# Off Topic > Suggestions for Improvement >  >  Forum access problems

## royUK

I have been unable to access the forum from home since Saturday morning

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## arlu1201

Roy,

The tech team is checking into this.

Update:  You should be able to access now.  Got an update from the tech team that your IP was blocked in the site firewall.

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## royUK

I'll hve to check when I get home.

Why would this happen?

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## NBVC

That's happened to me already twice since the shake down.

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## royUK

And nobody knows why!!!

Also, possibly another problem. There is no Reply button to the Competition Winners' Post - strange gremlins here.

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## NBVC

> And nobody knows why!!!
> 
> Also, possibly another problem. There is no Reply button to the Competition Winners' Post - strange gremlins here.



So, it's not just me!  I just posted a new thread on that issue...  :Roll Eyes (Sarcastic):

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## arlu1201

The July Competition subforum has been blocked to avoid any future entries.  Hence, you are not seeing any reply boxes.  

Regarding the inability to access the forum, a few IPs got blocked at the firewall and these have been cleared by the tech team.

Roy, please check if you are able to access from home.

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## royUK

I have checked & it's OK now. I still don't understand why this problem only occurs on this Forum

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## royUK

This is either a serious issue that the Tech team cannot resolve or it is intentional. I have received an email from Mordred saying he cannot access the Forum from home.

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## arlu1201

I guess his home IP has been blocked.  The tech team has moved most of the forum gurus and mods' IP addresses to the "whitelist".  Its possible, Mordred's office IP is on it but not the home one.

I have sent it over to the tech team for a check.

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## royUK

Why is it necessary for "most of the forum gurus and mods' IP addresses" to be on a white list. This means that there is a black list?

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## Mordred

Thanks Roy for bringing this up here and thanks Arlette for taking care of it.  I do appreciate it as I am able to get onto the site from home now!

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## mike7952

I too was unable to access the site saturday evening. It had worked all day until around 6:00 EST. I thought like royUK had said, maybe I was put on the black list. I had found that if I hooked my laptop up to modem with a ethernet cable I was able to access the site. So what I did, I did a hard reset of my Wireless router and I was then able to access the site again.

Thanks Mike
Just my 2-cents

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## NBVC

A gift from Simon Lloyd... who happens to coincidentally be blocked too!





> ....flush the cnf ip table in WHM (cPanel) this will release everyone who is currently mistakenly temporarily blocked!

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## romperstomper

It's funny:
1. The people it seems to keep happening to
2. That no-one seems to want to answer the why part.

Blocking IP addresses is generally a waste of time anyway unless your goal is simply to alienate real users.

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## Kyle123

How would blocking IPs work anyway, mine changes on a very regular basis. I know cable tends not to change very often, but surely you'd just reboot your modem?

Is the telecoms infrastructure of different countries so different that this is a viable method of blocking people? - Surely there can;t be *that* many home users with static IP addresses?

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## mike7952

@kyle 123

I have a cable modem and I could get  my ip to change just by unplugging the modem. Problem was my wireless router was keeping the same ip, even after I unplugged it. I hit release ip>get new and still it was getting the ip. So I just reset it and then it was able to get a new ip.

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## romperstomper

It's only really useful to block ranges. Occasionally for example you get hit by a lot of spammers from say China and they are all in the same subnet - you might, if it's really a problem, just block that range. The only good reason to block individual IPs that I can think of would be if you were under attack from one or two machines, but that would be pretty unlikely.

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## JosephP

same deal for me today. maybe the tech folk could stop blocking ip addresses or let me know what behavior of mine ticked em off. in the meantime I'll find another yard to play in

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## Mordred

Oh-oh, looks like you were black listed too JosephP!  You must be as bad as us others that make the list.

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## arlu1201

I think i need to make something clear here.  The tech team is *not* blocking any IPs.  It happens in the system automatically due to certain conditions ( i am not too tech savvy on that front to know the conditions but i can get the info for you). The tech team have been checking the IPs that are blocked and unblocking them.

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## romperstomper

There have been a few requests for an explanation already, so yes that would be nice. As Roy mentioned, this doesn't seem to happen elsewhere.

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## Mordred

Simon is now blocked too!

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## npamcpp

Arlette, have the "tech team" managed to dream up an explanation yet? Why, I ask, would ex moderators be "accidentally" blocked? Can you please explain this?

And please don't post that you'll check with the "tech team" and get back once you've learned more. Just get back with the answer.

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## Cutter

It's not just ex moderators being blocked.  I, along with others, was blocked from Friday evening to Monday morning a couple of weeks ago.

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## JBeaucaire

It happened to me as well, and after a day or so the techs resolved it and got me back in.   So, there's no favoritism occurring on the autoblock.  Conspiracy enthusiasts will have to look elsewhere.

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## jaslake

Hi

I probably posted this to the wrong Thread...here's a link
http://www.excelforum.com/suggestion...o-feature.html

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## JosephP

any more detail on this? blocked again for the last few days so can someone explain what behavior triggers it or fix the dad-blamed thing?

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## arlu1201

JosephP,

Have you been blocked while accessing from home alone?  Or even from office?

All IPs that were accidentally blocked by the system were released last week itself.

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## JBeaucaire

No conspiracy here, there is no intentional blocking of your IPs, as I think is evident in Arlu's pointing out they are trying to maintain a white list of IPs the security system (not a web programmer, apologies in advance for incorrect terminology) can use to try and keep obviously more important member (frequent) from getting blocked.  This auto block thing has happened to me, too, and was fixed.

There is no goal to alienate users.

On an agreeable tone, I also would like a little more technical explanation as to how it happens, while at the same time underlining I have no belief in intention here. I'd just like to know, if possible.  Thanks.

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## JosephP

from both because I use the same server. 
if you've released all accidentally blocked ip addresses, I reckon that must mean it was deliberately blocked because it still doesn't work. so my question is still what behavior would cause that?

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## JosephP

> No conspiracy here, there is no intentional blocking of your IPs



who mentioned conspiracies? I'm just asking what behavior would cause the system to block an ip?
but per my response to arlu1201 if all the accidentally blocked ones have been cleared any that remain must be deliberately so

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## JBeaucaire

Sorry, JP, I was reading from the start of this thread again when I responded.  I completely forgot to check where the new responses were from.  My apologies, 6am, here... guess I'm still groggy.    :Frown:

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## arlu1201

No, they were cleared last week but its possible they got blocked during the week. I have asked the tech team to check it up.

Are you using a different server today?  Or has it started working for you again?  Need this info to give it to the tech team.

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## JosephP

JP to JB: gotcha-see what you mean.

@arlu1201
yes I am or I couldn't be here talking to you ;-)

as Joe Friday said "All we want are the facts, ma'am". specifically it would be nice to know why it gets blocked so I can prevent it happening again or resign myself to working around it

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## Kyle123

I too would like an explanation of why this happens.

I like your sig Joseph, though I'd also add PieCharts

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## JosephP

pie charts are not inherently bad-they're just badly used (or used by bad people)-their useful applications are few and far between but they do exist

the same can be said of 3d charts but I don't work in marketing so it's not an argument I care for :-)
(when I talk about 3d charts I don't mean real XYZ charts which have a true purpose in life)

I find the idea of using excel 2007 in linux way more horrifying ;-P (using it in windows is bad enough)

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## Kyle123

hehe actually it runs quite well. I don't really use it though, just for tinkering for forums  :Wink:

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## JosephP

using wine or another emulator? which distribution-ubuntu?

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## Kyle123

Yeah, wine with playonlinux front end, linux mint 13 maya 64-bit cinnamon

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## JosephP

sounds interesting. I haven't used mint for about a year (version 11 I think) but preferred it to the others I've tried.

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## Kyle123

Yeah, I'm quite liking it I really only use my computer for web dev and Excel forums, but it's really been up to the task so far - as strenuous as my use is  :Wink:

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## JBeaucaire

_(completely off topic post)_

JP, just noticed your sig - I absolutely love that.   How about _'teaching Excel to read your crappy address book data'_ ?   :Wink:

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## JosephP

people do that?? ;-)

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## JosephP

back on topic for a moment it seems the address blocks have been cleared so thank you for that. would still really like to know why it happens in the first place so I can avoid it in future

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## JosephP

broke again. guess I'll have to get used to working round it

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## arlu1201

We are receiving lots of DDOS attacks on our server.  Hence the tech team is optimizing the firewall more than what it is, to secure us from ddos attacks.  

I have passed on your IP to them to keep it in the safe list.

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## Cutter

I was blocked yesterday.

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## JosephP

misery loves company ;-)

anyway if the server is under attack don't worry about this-it's easy to work around for me

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## Simon Lloyd

> We are receiving lots of DDOS attacks on our server.  Hence the tech team is optimizing the firewall more than what it is, to secure us from ddos attacks.  
> 
> I have passed on your IP to them to keep it in the safe list.



Arlette, server firewalls cannot stop DDOS attacks, the only way that the effect can be reduced is by mitigating the requests to server through other servers which can handle an extremely large number of requests and funnel the requests to a close, you can also NOT stop a DDOS attack until it's run it's course or the attackers get bored, i know this because i have been on the receiving end of a few and have been through many measures to counter it, so adding an ip to a safe list would not allow a user through whilst denying attackers.

You are correct that the issue with access is the firewall (CSF in cpanel) and how aggressive the settings are for ip banning  :Smilie:

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