Problems reaching the site from work

I'm trying to get to www.pythonchallenge.com from work. The IP that would show up is: 64.28.152.131

The network administrators have assured me that they aren't blocking www.pythonchallenge.com's IP address (67.138.240.19), so it's something of a mystery.

Might you or your website/Internet provider be blocking incoming requests from our block of IPs?

Maybe you want us to get work done, and not work on Python puzzles? :-}

Thanks.

Because I was curious, I tried going to some other random IPs in your subnet, and http://67.138.240.3/ (http://builder.pagewizard.com) does come up prompting me for a username and password.

So I believe my admins when they tell me they're not blocking the subnet.

Weird!

[thesamet]

It is impossible to connect to pythonchallenge.com by entering its ip in the url, since it is a shared IP (or a virtual host, or something).

I think the problem is lying in some misconfigured DNS server.

In any case, I haven't blocked any IPs from using the python challenge (yet).

It is impossible to connect to pythonchallenge.com by entering its ip in the url, since it is a shared IP (or a virtual host, or something).

Yeah, you've got a name-based virtual host. There are basically three types of virtual hosts:

- web-site per IP address, where a server uses IP aliases and has multiple IP's assigned to a NIC.

- web-site per port, where you run each web-site on a different port, but all on the same IP (not very common...)

- multiple web-sites per IP address. In this case, the web-server somehow needs to know which web-site to serve up. It determines this by looking at the HTTP Host: header sent by the browser. For this to work, you need to visit the site by its name, otherwise the web browser just sends the IP in the HTTP Host: header and the web-server doesn't have anyway to know which virtual host to serve.

So the real question is, why can't you visit pythonchallenge by hostname? Are you getting a DNS failure? I just did a cursory check of pythonchallenge's DNS and I don't see any problems. The .com servers delegate the DNS for pythonchallenge.com to ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com. The glue records for ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com look fine and each of those servers appears to be returning the correct answer for pythonchallenge.com when asked... so I'm not sure what's causing your DNS problems.

Can you get to http://www.bluehost.com/ ?

The IP that would show up is: 64.28.152.131

The network administrators have assured me that they aren't blocking www.pythonchallenge.com's IP address (67.138.240.19), so it's something of a mystery.

If Python Challenge IP is the one you posted, ( sorry I'm too lazy to nmap ATM ) then the one you gave your sysadmin, differs, or was this a typo in your post?

Also it is possible if you are going through a proxy they blocked the IP for Python Challenge alone. I often do this and will not tell them yes or no if it's blocked or not. I suggest you try and at least ping the server from work to see if you get a response.