Website problems

[Cid]

So I have a website for my students, mr-robinson.com

It has worked fine for two years.

A month ago, I wanted to exchange a load of files between a friend who lived 100 miles away. Instead of driving to each other, I gave him the ftp info to the site, set up a non public directory for him, and had him upload away.

When I was at work (aka a high school), I downloaded all that at blazing fast speeds. We're talking like 80 gigs of stuff. I mean... I'm a dick.

Anyway, two problems resulted from this little exchange.
1. My webhost (lunarpages) quickly suspended my account for uploading copyrighted information (somewhere in the 80 gigs). Opps. I didn't know you were looking so closely. I quickly deleted the stuff in question, dealt with all the red tape, and the account was unsuspended about 1 week later.

2. My website has never worked (aka loaded) again <I>at my work (the high school)</i>. I get time out errors. Or whatever it is called when nothing loads. This is the real problem. I've been trying to figure out what is going on. I guess there are two possibilities. One, lunarpages didn't like all the traffic coming from that IP address and banned it (I've asked them and they have denied this). Or two, my school didn't like all the bandwidth being funneled to that website and blocked the IP address.

So how the heck do I figure out what is going on? How can I check who is blocking what? It has been a month now. I've sent emails to the IT at my school, but they are clueless. I need a computer genius to tell me how to pinpoint the culprit, and then how to tell IT where to look to fix things.

I million thank yous.

[o_O]

Try doing the following on a computer that is unable to access the website and post the results here:

1. Open up a command prompt (window + R hotkey, and type "cmd" in the prompt)
2. Type "tracert [your web address]"

It'll show you a trace of each network device it hits before it finally starts timing out. Note that you'll probably get one or two superficial timeouts and it'll continue on after those (those devices just aren't responding to ICMP requests), but when it starts timing out on consecutive hops is where you're likely to have hit the blockage.

I think it's probably your school network that'll be blocking it. It could be an automated rule system which blocks websites with abnormally large traffic to or from them, which would explain why you're IT department can't figure it out. It could also be your school's ISP blocking "suspicious traffic" or even according to the ISP contract terms.

[Hollycat]

o_0 is most likely correct, the school is blocking the website. Many schools have programs that block inappropriate websites that gives them the option of choosing specific sites to block, in which case sometimes the site will simply refuse to load. It is also possible, although not likely, that the traffic from your site pushes the schools server to the limit and so it cannot load. Really there is no way to tell exactly what is happening until you find out what web protect program the school has, or at the very least contact whomever is in charge of the internet protocal for your district. Sorry I can't be more helpful

[Cid]

Here is the image I took from the tracert at school.

My school certainly has a content filter, but I know that the site isn't being blocked in <I>that</i> manner.

I think it is more about that traffic I did that triggered an automated block. In other words, I don't see the typical content blocked page when trying to access my site. Just a time out.

So how do I get the potentially clueless IT to figure out what settings to tweak to unblock me? Hmm, or if it was the ISP is this a lost cause?

Lastly, say nothing works. What are my options (such as proxies)? Most all of the proxies are blocked through the schools content filter. What is a scenario where I could 1) access the website and 2) perhaps high hopes, but be able to FTP at school.

[o_O]

Ok, well that's definitely being blocked by your school. Any IP range beginning with 10 is an internal IP address, so you can see that it's not even making it out of your school network. The device at 10.252.22.1 is most probably the one responsible for blocking the request, but it's possible the request is actually making it one or two hops further, on devices that aren't responding to ICMP (tracert) requests.

You should ask your school's network admin to look at the logs for that device (most likely a firewall, I'd guess), and possibly do a live test if that can be organised. Unfortunately there's not a lot more I can tell you, other than to kick your IT department and threaten them with great violence.

When it comes to proxies, I'd advise you to be <i>very</i> careful, since a lot of companies have an instant dismissal policy for flouting the network rules. Though you might wanna note down a few of the proxy addresses from http://freeproxysite.com and try them there. As for the FTP thing though, try <a href="http://www.net2ftp.com/">this</a> out. It's an HTTP-based FTP client that operates from within your browser.