Ask HN: Why can't I get to HN from home? Am I banned?

4 points·superchink··3 comments

Recently I've noticed that I can't get to HN from my home IP (I'm using a proxy to post this).

This is a new problem for me, so I'm a bit unsure as to how to identify the root cause.

I can ping news.ycombinator.com, and I've attempted a traceroute, which seemed to get stuck on po1.car03.hstntx1.networklayer.com (207.218.223.10) - The Planet.

Is there any way to tell if my IP/submet is banned somewhere?

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You didn't give much info, such as whether or not you really have a fixed IP address. I'm assuming you do.

The drop-dead on traceroute(1) seems normal, well, at least I'm getting the same. If I'm reading the domain name properly, it's hinting at Houston Texas as the last point where a border gateway/firewall responds.

Other than contacting PG directly and taking some of his time, there's really no way to find out if there's an IP/subnet ban in place.

If your ISP is doing something dumb (bad caching), then one possible answer is to use HTTPS rather than HTTP.

https://news.ycombinator.com

If someone using your ISP is doing something dumb (running a scraper), then you're probably stuffed.

Thanks for the ideas…

I tried using SSL and got a 502 Proxy Error: ”Error reading from remote server”

It seems to me (I could be totally off) that there may be a ban on HN which is refusing to give a response to requests from my IP.

If anyone can tell me I'm completely wrong, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks again.

I had two separate failures recently -- they seemed to have been issues with parts of the route from at&t uverse. They both resolved themselves after 24-48 hours.

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