# Help!!! Blocked from the SDMB **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [June 4, 2005, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940 "2005-06-04T23:08:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2005, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/1 "2005-06-04T23:08:56Z")
I already emailed **TubaDiva** about this, but if anyone else can help, I’d sure be grateful. I can’t get to the boards from home (I’m at work now). When I click on my SDMB bookmarks or click the “Message Boards” link at the top of [straightdope.com](http://straightdope.com), I can see the browser trying to pull up the page, but it’s not able to. It’s just like what happens when the server crashes. I have two computers at home, an iBook and an eMachines desktop. On the iBook, I have Safari and Firefox and on the eMachines, I have Internet Explorer and Firefox. All four browsers are having this problem. I started a thread on the Fathom boards asking for help and someone suggested that maybe my IP had been blocked accidentally. Like I said, I already emailed **TubaDiva** , but I don’t know if she’s “working” today or not, so I thought I’d see if any other mods or admins could help me. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Shadez](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/90ced4/32.png) [@Shadez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shadez)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2005, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/2 "2005-06-05T00:08:04Z")
When you emailed **TubaDiva** you put SDMB in the subject line, right? ---
**Author:** ![Gaudere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2005, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/3 "2005-06-05T00:13:56Z")
If your IP was blocked, you would get a screen that says something like “sorry! You are not allowed to access this page”. What you are describing sounds like a problem with your ISP or some network connection along the way. Or do you have any content blocks on your computer, so some sites are resticted? ---
**Author:** ![Acetylsalicylic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e8c25b/32.png) [@Acetylsalicylic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acetylsalicylic)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2005, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/4 "2005-06-05T01:05:25Z")
> [@MidnightRadio](#): > > I can see the browser trying to pull up the page, but it’s not able to. It’s just like what happens when the server crashes. What message do you actually get? If you get the “Sorry! You aren’t allowed” message mentioned by **Gaudere** , you are probably IP blocked at the SDMB server. If you get an “Operation timed out” or similar message, then there is probably a block or glitch somewhere between the SDMB server and your computer. > [@](#): > > When I click on my SDMB bookmarks or click the “Message Boards” link at the top of [straightdope.com](http://straightdope.com) So you are able to get to [straightdope.com](http://straightdope.com) from all 4 browsers at home, but not the boards? ---
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2005, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/5 "2005-06-05T02:03:32Z")
> [@Gaudere](#): > > If your IP was blocked, you would get a screen that says something like “sorry! You are not allowed to access this page”. What you are describing sounds like a problem with your ISP or some network connection along the way. Or do you have any content blocks on your computer, so some sites are resticted? I don’t think I have any content blocks, but like I said, it’s happening on two computers. The message I’m getting (on IE, anyway) is the “This Page Cannot Be Displayed” one. On Firefox, the operation times out and on Safari, it just keeps trying and trying. > [@Acetylsalicylic](#): > > So you are able to get to [straightdope.com](http://straightdope.com) from all 4 browsers at home, but not the boards? Exactly. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2005, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/6 "2005-06-05T21:59:55Z")
Could possibly be a DNS issue at your ISP. ---
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/7 "2005-06-06T02:11:43Z")
Well, it’s working again. I don’t know what happened, but it’s nice to have my Dope back. I was planning to call Cox (my ISP) when I got home from work last night, but we’d had a bad storm and the power was out. It didn’t come on until about an hour and a half ago. When I logged on, the first thing I did was come here and—what do you know?—it’s working. > [@Quartz](#): > > Could possibly be a DNS issue at your ISP. What’s DNS? ---
**Author:** ![AZCowboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/97f17d/32.png) [@AZCowboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AZCowboy)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/8 "2005-06-06T03:33:56Z")
DNS - Domain Name Service. It’s the protocol and network infrastructure that convert the url like [boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com) to an IP address. Your computer needs that address in order to retrieve pages from the board. Sometimes, glitches occur. With DNS, they will often straighten out over time. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/9 "2005-06-06T03:37:13Z")
> [@](#): > > What’s DNS? Computers don’t actually use names like “straightdope” between themselves. The names the computers use are numbers called IP addresses, like 207.97.195.229 (the address for [boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com)). When you type in a name like [boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com), or follow a link to that address, your computer contacts another computer called a Domain Name Server (DNS), to ask it if it knows the numerical address for the computer with that name. If the DNS knows, it’ll return that to your computer, and your computer can proceed to use that address to send information to and receive information from [boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com). If the DNS doesn’t know, it’ll ask some other DNS higher up the line, which knows more addresses, and so on. In principle, this should always eventually get you to some server which knows where things are and point you in the right direction, but in practice, glitches happen from time to time. So what happened here is most likely that the DNS your home ISP uses got confused, but the DNS at work didn’t. ---
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 11:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/10 "2005-06-06T11:44:28Z")
Okay, now I’ve got another question: If, when I was having the problem, and if the problem really was a DNS issue, would typing 207.97.195.229 into my browser’s address bar have gotten me to the boards? ---
**Author:** ![UncleBeer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/977dab/32.png) [@UncleBeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleBeer)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/11 "2005-06-06T12:16:54Z")
Nope. ---
**Author:** ![Noone\_Special](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noone_special/32/2863_2.png) [@Noone\_Special](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noone_Special)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/12 "2005-06-06T12:47:15Z")
> [@UncleBeer](#): > > > [@MidnightRadio](#): > > > > Okay, now I’ve got another question: If, when I was having the problem, and if the problem really was a DNS issue, would typing 207.97.195.229 into my browser’s address bar have gotten me to the boards? > > Nope. Beg to differ. Just tried it and got redirected to the Boards main page. This works, as does typing “[boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com)” (without tacking “/sdmb” on the end), too. Dani ---
**Author:** ![Noone\_Special](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noone_special/32/2863_2.png) [@Noone\_Special](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noone_Special)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/13 "2005-06-06T12:50:52Z")
D’oh! :smack: Just realized the question was about trying this **during a DNS problem**. I think the answer is **still** that it would work, because the initial connection to the IP address would succeed, the **local** DNS cache should then cache the address when receiving the (redirection) response, and subsequently you’d have the name resolved in local cache. But I could well be wrong about this. These are the moments I wish we had editing to hide our idiocy… :smack: :smack: :smack: Dani ---
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/14 "2005-06-06T13:13:46Z")
Heh! I almost wish the problem would happen again so I could try it. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/15 "2005-06-06T16:25:08Z")
Temporarily switching proxies can sometimes get you through. My own server suddenly forgot where TV Tome was; I resolved the matter by switching to one of my cable isp’s other proxies, which was having no problems. ---
**Author:** ![CaveMike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cavemike/32/16379_2.png) [@CaveMike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaveMike)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2005, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/16 "2005-06-06T21:09:52Z")
> [@Noone Special](#): > > I think the answer is **still** that it would work You’re still right. If the problem was a DNS issue, then connecting via IP address would work fine. Hyper-links might not work if they are absolute instead of relative, but you could always manually type an address in replacing “[boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com)” with the IP address. You can also work-around the issue by adding a hard-coded entry to your hosts file. ---
**Author:** ![UncleBeer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/977dab/32.png) [@UncleBeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleBeer)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2005, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/17 "2005-06-07T13:51:04Z")
You sure about that? I mean, if a domain name and/or IP address is for some reason missing from the registry (usually because a change to it hasn’t propogated throughout the network yet), then how can a browser request packets from it? ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2005, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/18 "2005-06-07T14:14:09Z")
All the websites which advise on how to fix DNS problems confirm that putting the IP number in will work. [This site](http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article40-page1.php) , for instance: _A quick way to test this_ (ie whether one there’s a DNS problem)\* is to try to access the problem website via its IP address instead of its name.\* _…216.239.51.100 is [google.com](http://google.com)’s IP address, so now enter [http://216.239.51.100/](http://216.239.51.100/) into your web browser’s address or location box. If the website comes up, you’ve got a DNS problem._ ---
**Author:** ![citybadger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/45deac/32.png) [@citybadger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/citybadger)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2005, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/19 "2005-06-07T14:24:29Z")
> [@UncleBeer](#): > > You sure about that? I mean, if a domain name and/or IP address is for some reason missing from the registry (usually because a change to it hasn’t propogated throughout the network yet), then how can a browser request packets from it? IP does not rely to DNS to be able send packets. The internet would work fine without DNS, you’d just have to reference everything by ip address [http://10.2.2.2/apage.html](http://10.2.2.2/apage.html) or whatever. Kind of like the telephone system, you’d have to look up the number of the site you want to contact. You may be thinking of IP route changes being propagated between routers. This is possible cause of failure but a different problem than DNS failures. There are public DNS servers you could change to if your ISP’s are giving you problems. Finally, even if you use IP addresses to get to a site, it still might not work if there are absolute references to other content in that site. So if my home page has a link to [www.citybadger.net/page2](http://www.citybadger.net/page2) it will fail if accessed by IP address. I should have coded it with a relative path /page2 instead, but stuff happends, and I might never notice. ---
**Author:** ![UncleBeer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/977dab/32.png) [@UncleBeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UncleBeer)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2005, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940/20 "2005-06-07T15:54:20Z")
> [@](#): > > You may be thinking of IP route changes being propagated between routers. This is possible cause of failure but a different problem than DNS failures. Yup. I am. Thanks for correcting my, citybadger. Thank you, too, aldiboronti for the additional info. Much apprectiated. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-blocked-from-the-sdmb/306940.md?page=2)