Large Scale Central

Unable to access LSC from Germany with T-Online

Hi folks,

I have never experienced this before and I have no idea how this is happening. I’m in Germany temporarily and when I try to access LSC I get this error:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I am accessing the site now via a proxy server in the US. It seems that T-Online is filtering our internet access!

Regards,

Peter.

I get that often on my smartphone (Verizon) when I am away from home. For some reason LSC gets no love while roaming.

Thanks Vic. This indicates a mis-configuration of the LSC server. That could be tricky to find for Bob.

Regards,

Peter.

Hey folks
A 403 error generally means that the server has blocked your request due to an entry in the access file (.htaccess if youre curious). I get my htaccess entries from a couple of places. An ISP will get their IP blocks into one of these services a couple of ways. For purposes of LSC, it means that these connectivity providers do nothing to stop spam account creation, or are sources of fake “page ranking” providers. They dont get on these lists unless they show a blatant disregard for beinig a “good neighbor” to the internet community as a whole.

In practical terms, this means that large portions of China, Eastern Europe and Russia are blocked, as well as many ISPs in other parts of the Eurasian Continent. A few US based ISPs are blocked as well.

I’ve run into this blocking with my web hosting and email service 1and1. They are based in Germany and they apparently (at least in the past) have been a haven for spammers. For years I couldn’t email my wife at work because their email server blocked my messages from getting through. I tried resolving this with 1and1 but gave up after 4 or 5 attempts. My wife’s employer changed to GMail a few years ago and the problem went away. In retrospect the employer’s Exchange server was probably using very outdated block list because I find GMail to be excellent at filtering out Spam.

Do a search of “T-Online blocked” and you may discover the reason.

Thanks for the explanations. T-Online is only Germany’s largest ISP. Being part of Deutsche Telekom, their mindset is still rooted in the old monopoly days. My guess is that they will only talk shop with organisations they consider their equal.

They talked my mum into cancelling her internet contract with the cable TV provider. Now that they have changed to IP telephony, all phone sockets in her house are dead, so she now has to run a cable downstairs if she wants to use a fax.

Now in Thailand access is back to normal.

Isn’t technology marvellous?

Regards,

Peter.

Its incredibly frustrating from a site operator standpoint, too. Companies like this dont do anything to police their own bad customers, so we have no real choice except to resort to the nuclear option.

The US ISP’s seem to be pretty diligent about policing. At my morning job where I don’t have anything to do with IT, they got a warning 30 days ago that their connection was being used in “breech of terms” and to correct the problem or service would be terminated. They run their own Exchange server and my guess is some malware on in-house computers was using it to send a flood of Spam. Of course the warning was ignored and last week the internet went dark. It took their IT company all day to correct the problem and convince the ISP to open it up again.

I use an ISP in California so I don’t get into the foreign snafus. Funny thing, their email anti spam was the same device I was using in-house for my last company (we had our own email server, Red Hat).

Been with the same company since 2002.

Greg

I had the same problem in Greece and Turkey.