It looks like someone in the area has been messing around with Slashdot again, and now when I try to access the site I get a nasty pink page telling me my IP address is banned.
Except it's not my IP address. Y'see, my ISP has a Transparent Proxy (or "Interception Proxy", as they are now correctly known). What this means is that all HTTP requests on port 80 are not actually handled by direct connections to the target machine, even though to the browser it seems that way. So there is no way around it. It's supposed to cache frequently used pages to speed things up and save on bandwidth costs, which I suppose I can't really fault.
Actually my gripe today is with Slashdot. As I've mentioned, this has happened before. Last time I wrote an email to their network admin saying that this IP was banned and that it wasn't really my IP address, etc. I also mentioned, and this is the important bit, that the proxy supplies correct X-Forwarded-For http headers. These contain the correct IP for the machine requesting the data.
However, they refuse to see this and have blocked the IP completely. Again. I suppose I'll just cut&paste my previous email and fire it off. Maybe tomorrow we'll have some progress!
Update! I got a reply back from one of the Slashdot admins. Apparently the proxy generated over 300 404 errors in less than an hour. Ok. I'm still blocked though, so that piece of information, however interesting, is absolutely useless. Oh well, we'll see if there is some progress tomorrow...
Posted by Dave at July 10, 2003 12:43 AM