Hi! I’m new here and hope to get some help.
For at least 5 hours today I can’t connect to https://chaos.social/ (the Mastodon server I’m on). Firefox gives me:
Unable to connect
Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at chaos.social.
The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the web.
From curl I’m getting:
$ curl --ipv4 --verbose https://chaos.social/
* Host chaos.social:443 was resolved.
* IPv6: (none)
* IPv4: 5.9.119.202
* Trying 5.9.119.202:443...
* connect to 5.9.119.202 port 443 from 192.168.1.45 port 40188 failed: Connection refused
* Failed to connect to chaos.social port 443 after 21 ms: Could not connect to server
* closing connection #0
curl: (7) Failed to connect to chaos.social port 443 after 21 ms: Could not connect to server
It’s the same for http, so not related to TLS.
All other websites work normally, but to this particular one I can’t connect from any device on my home network (I tired a few laptops, phones and our Raspberry PI home server). I tried to restart the router (Zyxel T-56). No change.
I can connect via mobile network or from a VPS in “the cloud”. Also https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/chaos.social.html shows that it’s on-line.
I can think of three reasons, but I’m not a networking guru, so maybe it’s something else:
-
My router blocks it
That would be surprising, because it has the stock configuration from my ISP and I definitely didn’t tweak anything in last days.
-
My ISP blocks it
But then it’s the same ISP for wired and mobile connection. The latter works.
-
The server is blocking me for some reason
I’d appreciate help in digging deeper, if only to learn.
Thanks for your help @infeeeee@lemm.ee ! I got in touch with admins at chaos.social and it turns out my IP is getting blocked because something on my network is making requests with user agent set to Googlebot 😬
It’s definitely not something I run intentionally. I suspect some malware. Will post about it in a separate thread I think.
Do a
tracerouteand check what is the last hop, where it stopsWhile waiting for the results I’m educating myself on
traceroute. It was super slow, but here’s the result. How do I interpret it?$ sudo traceroute chaos.social traceroute to chaos.social (5.9.119.202), 64 hops max 1 192.168.1.1 0.777ms 0.714ms 0.621ms 2 5.132.112.1 4.105ms 4.055ms 3.946ms 3 10.10.10.174 7.384ms 7.338ms 7.204ms 4 10.226.4.3 7.275ms 7.230ms 7.053ms 5 * * * 6 80.249.209.55 9.276ms 7.288ms 7.112ms 7 * * * 8 213.239.252.45 18.652ms 12.801ms 12.992ms 9 213.239.224.69 17.158ms 17.165ms 17.119ms 10 213.239.254.190 17.323ms 17.269ms 17.427ms 11 5.9.119.208 17.327ms 17.332ms 17.211ms 12 * * * 13 * * * 14 * * * ... asterisks all the way down 63 * * * ~ took 15m23s $ echo $? 1It seems to stop at
5.9.119.208, which seems close to the destination5.9.119.202.Note to self:
traceroutehas to be run withsudo, otherwise only gives asterisks.Edit: I’m getting almost exactly the same result when connecting via mobile network, when the connection to the site works. Am I doing it right?
It’s same for me, and I can open chaos.social, so from this I would guess you are blocked by chaos.social, not isp.
On Unix-like operating systems, traceroute sends, by default, a sequence of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets, with destination port numbers ranging from 33434 to 33534;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute
So they can easily block traceroute requests, it’s common that you can’t hop fully until the destination, it times out at some point.
You shouldn’t need sudo for a traceroute, so that’s something special on your system.
