broadband blocking legitimate websites?

[Nicholas232]

Hi all,

I have noticed that in the past 2 weeks I am not able to access through my broadband some of my work (university) websites. Initially I thought that the websites were down. But then I checked through mobile data (another company, not sky) and it was working fine. I have asked my employer whether for some reason they block outside IP addresses and they told me that they have heard that providers like sky and virgin sometimes block the address (!). 

I have tried explicitly to remove the shield, and then to include it explicitly to the whitelisted addresses, but without any success. 
I am wondering why this happens? An example of a website that I have lost access the past few weeks is:
https://tulip.liv.ac.uk/ 

what happened and the access was lost a few weeks ago? Any information on that is highly appreciated. thank you very much.

Kind regards,

Nicholas

[peter-marlow+1966]

Have you  changed  the age settings  on your  broadband? That may be the reason for it

[Nicholas232]

Dear P-C Marlow,

thank you so much for replying!

no I haven't changed anything. I have also explicitly whitelisted the site and it made no difference. I tried to remove completely the shield and again it didn't make any difference.

Kind regards,

Nicholas

[Nicholas232]

Update:

I tried it today and somehow the access is restored. I didn't do anything in particular.

Either the whitelisting takes 1 day to apply. I doubt that since the instructions say otherwise.
Or something else changed independently of my router/connection.

thank you anyway for the help.

Kind regards,

Nicholas

[Nicholas232]

Hi,

I have an update on this topic. So apparently what happens is that sometimes, apparently randomly I do not have access to these websites and some other times I have. On Sunday I had no access, yesterday Monday I had. Today I had to check and it looks like I don't have.

The website is up, there is no issue and it looks like that half of the time I have no access.

Has anyone else has seen such a thing before? Is this some issue with Sky? or something related to the fibre network somehow? thank you!

Kind regards,

Nicholas

[Choobs]

Yes - I'm a systems administrator for the University of Edinburgh and I'm debugging this exact problem right now. Many sites I look after are accessible from everywhere in the world except to Sky customers. 

[JimM1]

@Choobs Have someone who has a sky issue take a look on there account and at the Product settings for the Broadband Shield, adjust it to off fully open with NO filtering applied! If they need to adjust, allow 24hours for there system to filter through all off the account side, sky always say 2 hours but that seems to be unrealistic at times!

Also you may need to find out what Equipment hub wise, the older SR203 or the newer sky Max SR213, newer runs over Map-T protocol which is a form on CGNAT so just not as simple, but sky can make some changes on the REQUEST of the user! You will see reference at the top on the pinned post although that is a little focused VPN wise ignore that fact!

[Choobs]

Shield is turned OFF on the affected system.

J

[JimM1]

@Choobs Please see the rest was updating and editing on when your reply came through, and you may need a user to do a fixed DNS on there device, hopefully you can take them through it to establish what/why they cannot get to the IP required!

[Nicholas232]

Hi all,

the only way I found to work is to turn off the hub overnight and then the access is restored. Just turning it off for half an hour does not seem to work. 

It was suggested to me that there is a sharing of IP addresses and someone in my area may be trying to break into the university system. That would trigger an automatic temporary block from the uni system to this (range of?) IP address(es) and that would affect other users as well. I don't know whether holds any water. Myself I see the problem showing up and disappearing, though with less frequency now.

Kind regards,

Nicholas