Adventures In Computing: In Motion Blacklist
Computers are good (possible great?) when they do the tasks which they are assigned. They are terrible when they don’t do those tasks. And they are complicated when doing one task means failing at another task.
As I have this website, somewhere out there is a computer with the task of hosting this site. Unfortunately, twice now it has decided it didn’t want to talk to me. It continued to host the site, anyone else in the world could visit it. And I still had internet access, I could connect to any other site. But the one computer that my (this) website lived on would ignore any attempt I made to interact with it. Needless to say, this can make updating the site difficult.
While the underlying cause is still unknown, the immediate cause was the computer had added my IP (ie, me) to it’s blacklist. Why and how that happened is something I would like to find out, but at the time it was not directly important. What was important was restoring my access.
Servers generally do multiple tasks at once. In this case, one task was to provide a web server to the internet, for hosting my site and being visited by others. Another task was to identify and block those that ‘attacked’ the site. For whatever reason, I was identified as an attacker, and thus denied access to the site. Just a case of competing tasks.
To fix this I had to contact technical support at the host (InMotion Hosting). To their credit, they did fix the problem relatively quickly. Unfortunately, it did take some back and forth conversations to get it fixed. Whether that was caused by less then ideally trained staff, or my poor communication skills, I cannot say.
I’ve worked at support help desks in the past, so I can relate to the situation they are in. There will be mixed skill level, some technicians will be overqualified and others barely capable, with all levels in between. Anyone submitting a trouble ticket is doing so because there is a problem, meaning they are probably frustrated before the conversation starts. There are likely policies and procedures that have to be followed, some helpful and others not so much. And I’m sure I come across as an arrogant customer, as I tell them what is wrong and how to fix it.
Doesn’t help that at first glance the problem I described, ‘cannot connect to site’, sounds like a problem on my end. It is with the details, that I can connect anywhere else, which point to an issue on their end. In particular, the server had decided to add me to it’s blacklist. In this case a blacklist is a list of IP’s (ie people) that are ignored. Once I’m on that list, I can’t do anything with the site.
On the plus side, it got resolve. Quiet quickly once I was able to communicate the issue to the right person. It just took a few attempts to reach that stage. Hopefully I now have the key words to tell the technician if/when this happens again, leading to a quicker resolution then.
Which has me oddly looking forward to a repeat of this Adventure In Computing. If I can get the first person I reach to resolve the issue, maybe they can also identify the underlying source.