Am I doing something wrong, or missed a memo somewhere?

I have tried accessing the FPC forum on the website, but neither it, nor the Lazarus portion of the website is accessible. Basically, any portion of the website which includes the lazarus sub-domain doesn't work (which includes the forum portion). This has been the case for at least a year and a half. Not sure if something is messed up on the server side (with named or with httpd configuration?), or if I am doing something wrong on my side (though, I can not think of what).

Any info on this would be appreciated.

WY
Denver

Programming wrote

Any info on this would be appreciated.

It must be something on your side. The Lazarus Forum website works just fine here.

http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?action=forum

Regards,
Graeme

Well, can't recall to ever had any troubles to access either the main FPC side nor the Lazarus forum in that time frame you mentioned, downloading FPC on various computers as well as checking things on the forum...

Ralf
Los Angeles

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This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. http://www.avast.com

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

It must be something on your side. The Lazarus Forum website works just fine here. http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?action=forum

Strange.

I get "The connection has timed out" in Firefox, and "This webpage is not available" in Chrome (error code ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT). (No firewall, nothing in Windows "hosts" file, no proxy. Tried using "lazarus" in an unrelated URL to check if Comcast was — for some odd reason — URL keyword blocking, but nothing went wrong with that.)

Is the forum on a separate IP address from the main freepascal.org website? I was thinking I might try connecting to it via IP address, if it is, or adding a hosts entry for forum.lazarus.freepascal.org to bypass the DNS lookup.

WY
Denver

Programming wrote

Is the forum on a separate IP address from the main freepascal.org

website?

I was thinking I might try connecting to it via IP address, if it is, or adding a hosts entry for forum.lazarus.freepascal.org to bypass

the DNS lookup.

Does not look like that will work for me, neither. I'm in Denver, CO, and I just now remote logged in to my server in Arizona to try pinging the forum address which would both check access from another state and another ISP, as well as give the IP address. The ping from the server in Arizona responded with "From 80.120.208.116 icmp_seq=6 Destination Host Unreachable".

:(

WY
Denver

ping means crap, it just tells you what you already know, you can't reach that address. Kind of strange is the from IP address you mentioned above, as that doesn't look like any US address. Try (and possibly post) a traceroute from your local host instead. It will show where the data is actually passing through, if the name resolves in the first place (but DNS doesn't seem to be your issue going by what you described so far)...

For what it's worth, the IP addresses for the web site (www.freepascal.org) resolves for me (tried today from two different clients, one in Los Angeles-Park LaBrea, one in Santa Monica) as 85.222.228.11 and the Lazarus forum resolves as 80.123.225.56, and both sites are located in Europa. Maybe whatever firewall you're behind has one of those braindead "I want only US addresses to contact me" kind of ACLs implemented?

Ralf

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This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. http://www.avast.com

Hello Programming,

I can't ping it either. I get the same error as you. But when I use that URL in my web browser it works and loads the site just fine. I guess they set up the server not to respond to pings - something done quite often these days.

Regards,
Graeme

Programming wrote

The ping from the server in Arizona responded with "From 80.120.208.116 icmp_seq=6 Destination Host Unreachable".

Ralf Quint wrote

Try (and possibly post) a traceroute from your local host instead. It will show where the data is actually passing through, if the name resolves in the first place (but DNS doesn't seem to be your issue going by what you described so far)...

tracert from local machine (Colorado):
————

tracert forum.lazarus.freepascal.org

Tracing route to forum.lazarus.freepascal.org [80.123.225.56] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router [192.168.1.1] 2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 10.0.0.1
3 10 ms 8 ms 9 ms 67.165.230.1
4 9 ms 9 ms 8 ms
xe-11-1-0-0-sur03.arvada.co.denver.comcast.net [162.151.15.245] 5 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms
ae-10-0-sur02.arvada.co.denver.comcast.net [68.86.128.66] 6 8 ms 9 ms 8 ms
ae-21-0-ar01.aurora.co.denver.comcast.net [68.86.179.213] 7 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms
he-3-10-0-0-cr01.denver.co.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.92.25] 8 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms ae14.edge3.Denver1.Level3.net [4.68.127.129] 9 147 ms 148 ms 148 ms ae-0-11.bar2.Vienna1.Level3.net [4.69.153.150]
10 159 ms 148 ms 148 ms 212.73.203.138
11 152 ms 152 ms 152 ms AUX10-IIX11.highway.telekom.at [195.3.70.105]
12 154 ms 155 ms 154 ms 195.3.74.70
13 155 ms 155 ms 154 ms 80.120.208.116
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * 80.120.208.116 reports: Destination host unreachable.
Trace complete.
————

traceroute from not-local server (Arizona):
————
# traceroute forum.lazarus.freepascal.org
traceroute to forum.lazarus.freepascal.org (80.123.225.56), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 72.167.112.252 (72.167.112.252) 0.510 ms 0.539 ms 0.618 ms 2 ip-208-109-112-13.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.112.13) 0.440 ms 0.484 ms 0.543 ms
3 be9.trmc0215-01.ars.mgmt.phx3.gdg (208.109.112.5) 0.938 ms 0.943 ms 0.990 ms
4 be64.ibrsa0203-01.edg.mgmt.ams1.gdg (188.121.33.65) 144.810 ms 144.874 ms 144.861 ms
5 be64.ibrsa0203-01.edg.mgmt.ams1.gdg (188.121.33.65) 144.735 ms 144.703 ms 144.694 ms
6 * * *
7 195.3.70.49 (195.3.70.49) 159.903 ms
GRAX2-KLAX1.highway.telekom.at (195.3.68.137) 159.397 ms 195.3.70.157 (195.3.70.157) 159.983 ms
8 AUX3-LIX2.highway.telekom.at (195.3.68.170) 167.842 ms GRAZBC10-AUX10.highway.telekom.at (195.3.68.50) 167.539 ms 195.3.74.70 (195.3.74.70) 168.755 ms
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * * *
19 * * *
20 * * *
21 * * *
22 * * *
23 * * *
24 * * *
25 * * *
26 * * *
27 * * *
28 * * *
29 * * *
30 * * *
————

I tried upping the max-hops on the latter one to 60 but it wasn't any different from #s 9 through 30 above.
If I do the latter traceroute using the IP address of the forum that you provided (80.123.225.56), the traceroute is the same except for line #s 7 and 8:
————
7 195.3.70.49 (195.3.70.49) 159.618 ms 195.3.70.45 (195.3.70.45) 159.601 ms 195.3.70.209 (195.3.70.209) 159.047 ms 8 195.3.74.70 (195.3.74.70) 162.919 ms 195.3.118.110 (195.3.118.110) 163.090 ms 163.036 ms
————

I tried google searching that IP that showed up in my previous ping attempt (80.120.208.116), and the first entry is a post from the fpc-pascal list from Sun Apr 2014 21:13:45 CEST where the same situation is being discussed along with traceroute output for the person with the issue. I didn't see a post that mentioned if he ever resolved his issue. ref. < www.hu.freepascal.org/lists/fpc-pascal/2014-April/041558.html >

WY
Denver

hi, i am helmut

i am one of the admins of the hosting facility that the lazarus website lives in.
The lazarus website/mailinglist is hosted here in graz/austria. the servers external ip is 80.123.225.56, while the firewalls ip is 80.120.208.116 ( here your packets seem to end, so you are just 2 feet away from the data :-) )

The firewall disallows icmp packet to go through to the webserver.

I changed this now because the firewall drops also fragmented packets, icmp is needed for mtu path discovery to work - It may be a problem that you emit fragmented packets along your path, which reach us but then get dropped (for security reasons).

Maybe my change helps you.

You can also try to use lazarus.firmos.at, which is the same ip and may rule out some strange dns problems.

Another thing you could do is to try to change the mtu of your networking equipment (network card that you are using to browse to the site) downwards (say from 1500 -> 1400 to test).
Just google or
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2224654/cisco-subnet/mtu-size-issues.html

HTH,

helmut

For what it's worth, when I perform a ping or traceroute from here (central Virginia), I get a response from mailer.lazarus.freepascal.org at ip address 80.123.225.56, which I believe was already mentioned as the proper ip address. So, perhaps you could try mailer.lazarus.freepascal.org for the forum and see how that one resolves for you.

An update, after several months.

After the last message, I adjusted the MTU size down to 1400. Doing a tracert, after this change, to forum.lazarus.freepascal.org now succeeds, but I am still unable to connect via my desktop (Win 7 Pro 64bit) to the address from neither Chrome nor Firefox (I get a timeout). I can connect without a problem via the original Kindle Fire tablet from the same LAN, so that seems to eliminate the router as a problem.

At that point I tried to figure out what is wrong without bothering the folks here on the list.

I have taken up the habit of every time I get access to someone's desktop or other device to try accessing the forum. About 1 out of 4 Win-7 desktop computers I have tried will not connect (I did not check which versions of Win-7). The few Linux boxes I have tried have all succeeded in connecting. Same successful connection via the Mac and Android/Linux tablets and phones I have tried. I have not tried any iOS, XP, or Win 8 devices/laptops/boxes. In the computers that did not connect, it did not seem to matter if I used Chrome, Firefox, or IE (if one failed, they all failed).

Using the IP address explicitly does not seem to make a difference.

Using Wireshark for monitoring, the connection seems to hit a wall once a SYN packet is sent during the handshake (no SYN-ACK packet is returned from 80.123.225.56, the IP of the forum).
192.168.1.3 → 80.123.225.56, TCP protocol, length 66B, port 51683→80 [SYN] Seq=0; Win=8192; Len=0; MSS=1360; WS=4; SACK_PERM=1 After the packet doesn't get acknowledged, it retransmits the same packet twice, then transmits the packet *without* the Window Scaling=4 parameter (other information is the same) twice. Then it repeats the entire process until the timeout hits.

I have tried figuring this out, but after several months, I seem to not be getting any further in solving this. I am not sure what else I need to check.