Burst reblocking NTL proxies

RazorD · 19-04-2005, 10:52

Hey guys,

This is more a heads up really - Burst (an american server provider) have started blocking NTLs proxies again, meaning anyone inside NTL (apart from a few proxies which havent been blocked yet) are unable to access any Burst site on port 80.

This is due to their Anti-DoS software being too overprotective, and blocking proxies which try to connect too much (great, hey?)

This happened last week on friday, and took a good few hours to fix. I've let burst know, but i cant see it being fixed any time soon.

-Raz

Neil · 19-04-2005, 11:51

*Moved to Web Proxy Discussion forum*

Chrysalis · 19-04-2005, 14:48

The reason why ntl proxies get caught out by anti ddos measures is because most common way of reading the src ip address is via firewall level be it a software firewall or hardware firewall, it will only read the actual ip of the connection and not bother to dig deeper in the packets for a refferal ip. When doing anti ddos the key to it is to minimise the impact of blocking ddos and if you start looking in all the incoming packets then a ddos is going to much more effective since the extra processing is been applied to many thousands of packets per second in that case. So to be fair to the hosts that end up catching out ntl proxies its not that simple to avoid doing it other then applying a whitelist for the ip range.

I wonder if NTL really think its that essential to have proxies (only isp I know of in uk still using them), almost daily I read of an issue concerning proxy servers now. Images get cached locally on user's pcs by default so bandwidth used by web browsing really is quite small.

Chris W · 19-04-2005, 15:36

I know for a fact that Virgin and Freeserve also use proxies...

**Paul** · 19-04-2005, 16:03

and AOL ...

IanUK · 19-04-2005, 16:08

Freeserve/Wanadoo no longer use proxies, they did away with them while I was still with them a year or so ago - Eusa would probably know more about that.

Virgin uses NTL's network I believe ?

AOL certainly does use proxies, but doesn't seem to suffer the same non site loading as NTL does.

Proxies are a pain in the bum, not a day goes by when I don't have to change proxies manually to get a certain site to load

cheers

Ian

Chrysalis · 19-04-2005, 18:52

Yeah you are right about AOL I forgot all about them, Ian I have the same problem. Every day at least one site will have a problem forcing me to hop to my own proxy or to a different NTL one, I have got so used to it I will only post about major problems now.

Stuart · 19-04-2005, 19:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanUK

Proxies are a pain in the bum, not a day goes by when I don't have to change proxies manually to get a certain site to load

While I don't generally have any trouble with Proxies, I agree. When I learned Web Design (about a year after the World Wide Web came online), one of the first things our lecturer said to us is that if possible, we shouldn't use Proxies. The reason being that they weren't (at the time) always good at refreshing their caches (so, you may get out of date data), and were just one more thing to go wrong.

Toto · 19-04-2005, 21:35

ntl uses proxies, simple as that and so does Telewest and others already mentioned.

And, as has been said before, over and over and over again, the technology for reading the client IP address is there, it takes a couple of lines of code in the web traffic server log script to record it. If Burst, and other networks can't tell the difference between a client and forwarding IP address, then they accept that they will get complaints from their users.

Whether ntl choses to drop proxies in the future is something of a hot potato, who knows, somebody involved with that side of the network may be reading these posts, and asking the same question - Are they really needed now?

IanUK · 19-04-2005, 22:17

Quote:

who knows, somebody involved with that side of the network may be reading these posts, and asking the same question - Are they really needed now?

Lets hope so, I'd imagine quite a large part of the customer service team's time is used up with customers saying: 'I can't get such and such a site' and being told to change their proxy.

I've found it almost automatic since being with NTL, a site doesn't work - switch proxy - bam ! there it is - working fine, a lot of customers probably think that the internet hardly ever works the same from day to day...

cheers

Ian

Eusa · 20-04-2005, 12:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanUK

Freeserve/Wanadoo no longer use proxies, they did away with them while I was still with them a year or so ago - Eusa would probably know more about that.

With enough googling you can work out the answer.
And google ( probably ) doesn't get me sacked.

Probably.

Chrysalis · 20-04-2005, 12:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

ntl uses proxies, simple as that and so does Telewest and others already mentioned.

Telewest dont force proxies.

Most of the time it isnt the web server software itself doing the blocking its a firewall or some other anti ddos filter. Inspecting packet data is expensive which is why many hosts just check the REAL src address, I do it myself on my own servers, when a flood of requests is recieved from an ip it is blocked I dont insect the content of the packets only the type of packet and src and dst are checked.