Geeklog Forums

Hi,

Over the years I occasionally get one of my volunteer editors appear to be locked out of our geeklog site. The symptom is that when they go to the site it times out, typically with an error like

Gateway Timeout

The following error occurred:

[code=GATEWAY_TIMEOUT] A gateway timeout occurred. The server is unreachable. Retry the request.

Please contact the administrator.

Other writers are reporting errors like Oops can't find the site. It might be browser dependent.

If they try a different ISP (so they might try accessing from work instead of home) then it works. So they are effectively locked out at one location and it lasts for a few weeks (!) and then mysteriously fixes itself. This has happened to editors, i.e. people that have access to log in and save stories and upload images to stories. Although once it breaks it happens regardless of whether they are likely to be logged in. I don't know about general users.

But it's got much worse than an occasional editor being hit. Over the last few weeks this has happened to 4 of our 5 editors, including me from my work (but not from home). The growing suspicion is that it has occurred after trying to save a story with an image.

Does that sound like it is a problem on the host side? Perhaps the data centre where we are hosted from is falsely detecting us as been spammers and blocking our IP addresses for a period of time? I've contacted our site's host (here in Australia) and they are looking into it although they buy third party from a big company in the US. From memory if people use an anonymising site they can then at least see our site, so that suggests IP blocking to me. I checked on http://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check and my work is not black listed by anyone there.

I doubt it is a Geeklog problem but I just thought I'd better ask on here.

Cheers,
Brett

It does sound like a hosting issue.



I think that may be the problem (your host is running some sort of automatic ban software) though I am not sure why saving a story would trigger a spam/hack detection since we are not doing anything special.

Tom

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Just for completeness, an update.

I suggested to our host that we may be being banned and it turned out that yes, all our editors had been blacklisted. Presumably the act of uploading images to stories triggered something too sensitive in their algorithms.

We got our IP addresses whitelisted and problem solved. It explains a lot of these kinds of issues over the years. Unfortunately it's not a permanent solution, no doubt our IPs addresses will change and we'll do something "suspicious" and get banned again, but hopefully we'll be able to get it fixed quickly.

Thanks for the update. I haven't heard of it happening before and as far as I know Geeklog doesn't do anything "suspicious" when a file is uploaded. It is similar to alot of other scripts that allow you to upload images.

Tom

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.