HN Explorer

Ask PG: Did my IP get banned from News.YCombinator.com ?

2 points by gdee ↗ HN
Hi. I'm not really sure if this is the proper way to address this but the contact email addresses from ycombinator.com seemed even worse choices.

My problem is that since two days ago I'm unable to read news.ycombinator.com from my home connection. First I confirmed that the page still works by accessing from a different ISP (from where I post this) then I got confirmation from another person on the same ISP as me that he can also access without problems. It's not my computer either seeing how none of the other 5 in my house gets a better result. I'm on a dynamic IP and currently I have 87.221.94.63 and all I get when I go to news.ycombinator.com is blank page. Firebird says that the http code is 200 OK but with 0 bytes content and Chrome says: "Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error."

At this point I think It's possible I might have some sort of ban on my IP (it's dynamic, but does'n change very often so it's possible I still have the same as two days ago). I started (or I've noticed) wright after I restarted a crashed Firefox session and it tried to reload several tabs with HN threads. Maybe that rapid fire request tricked some IDS or something. I also noticed that previous to this (by a few days) I lost my ability to down vote comments without, to my knowledge, having done anything offending. So meybe a similar "session with many HN threads reloaded quickly" caused that and then decided enough is enough?

Please help... the internets are tasteless without HN :_( (<small_and_almost_hidden>on the flip side I seem to have worked more the last two days but screw that and give me back HN</small_and_almost_hidden>)

14 comments

[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] thread
TallGuyShort
I thought you needed to have 250 karma in order to down-vote things. There _might_ have been a change in the threshold, as you don't appear to have been given a lot of negative karma all of a sudden.
gdee
Heh. I used to have that bit set. No biggie though. I wasn't using it that much I was just curious and mentioned it as potentially useful for someone wanting to restore my access. Having to access HN through VNC over SSH over lame ADSL is what cramps my style these days.
jey
You could at least switch to browsing through an SSH proxy instead of VNC:

  ssh -D 12345 user@example.com
Then set your browser to use localhost:12345 as a SOCKS proxy. Add -N to the parameters to tell it not to start a shell.
gdee
Thank you for the tip. Never needed it so never knew about it. Dully committed to BrainDB.
pg
No; the problem must be something else.
gdee
Most appreciated. Thank you.

I feel a proverbial pink slip going to my ISP if they don't fix it soon. You don't mess with part of someone's lifestyle like that. Thank you for hosting my homepage.

gdee
Of course, that's Firebug not Firebird.
jacquesm
The ultimate noprocrast...
gdee
Please don't joke with this :)

www.hackerne.ws get's me a blank page as well. The plot thickens (I know it points to the same IP). Hopefully, I won't have to google for HN with site:wikileaks.org to untangle this.

jacquesm
it might simply be a peering problem, something between your provider and HN.

Have you done a traceroute ?

gdee
Yes. About 10 seconds after first seeing the blank page. The trace looks healthy and ends ok. Pinging news.ycombinator.com directly drops nothing. HTTP apparently is where it chokes. Thank you for your interest. EDIT: telneting to tcp 80 just get's me a killed connection when I press "G".
jacquesm
use a proxy then ?

I tried the telnet trick and it works by simply typing GET / HTTP/1.0

'G' doesn't do much normally, or did you mean that it disconnects you as soon as you type G ?

Is your DNS working properly ? This is the IP news.ycombinator.com should resolve to:

174.132.225.106

gdee
>> or did you mean that it disconnects you as soon as you type G ?

Yes.

>> Is your DNS working properly ?

Yes.

Thanks for all the replies. It was a peering problem in the end. I guess they didn't like the pink slip idea in the end. That or the thing broke other more important things for them.

icey
Have you tried resetting your home router? (Or circumventing it as a test)