gato Posted August 25, 2005 at 08:40 AM Report Share Posted August 25, 2005 at 08:40 AM A site that I set up for my classes started getting blocked yesterday by the great firewall of China. The site, polycrit.com, has a so-far empty discussion forum, some audio clips and transcripts from a public TV news show, plus some other historical material I've had on there for several months. I sought out Roddy's expertise. He looked at the site and thought its content shouldn't be sensitive enough to warrant a ban. He was right that my hosting company might have the answer. It turns out that several of their servers, including my own shared server apparently, had experienced blocking from China in recent weeks. Roddy thought others might be interested in this info. I've copied the email from my hosting company below. From the email, it seems that the blocking is server-based rather than IP-based, though I don't know how that would work technically. That seems the case because in a shared hosting situation, each site has a different IP address though they all reside on the same server. If one site's IP address is blocked, other sites on the same server should not be affected. It's a good thing my hosting company is Hong Kong-based and is probably very familiar with these issues. I went with HK-based servers originally because they're known to be faster to access from China. ---------- Hello Mike, I am afraid that currently the server hosting your account for polycrit.com cannot be accessed from Chinese networks. We had similar problems a year ago and we were able to resolve them with China Telecom. Nevertheless two of our server got blocked several weeks ago and this time China Telecom is not cooperating at all. They deny to have blocked the access to our servers, but it is a fact the no one in China can reach the "blocked" servers. Unfortunately we will not be able to provide you with any time frame in which the problem would be resolved. We suggest migrating your account to another server. It will not take more than 20 minutes to move your website to the new server. There will be no downtime. The propagation of the new DNS will not affect the uptime of polycrit.com since we will set manually custom DNS records on the old server. Please let us know how you would like to proceed further. I would like also to request from you to contact your ISP in China about the connectivity problem that you experience and ask them for assistance on the issue. If you manage to obtain any information about these blocks, we will greatly appreciate if you share the details with us. Thank you! Best Regards, Abuse Team Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miss_China_so_much Posted August 25, 2005 at 10:37 AM Report Share Posted August 25, 2005 at 10:37 AM The Great Firewall of China! I love the Great Wall but the Firewall ? I still remember that the google was once blocked for at least two weeks in 2002. Just because when you search on Google, the "evil" sites are not filtered by the search engine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trevelyan Posted August 25, 2005 at 11:09 AM Report Share Posted August 25, 2005 at 11:09 AM Unless you have a dedicated server, you may just be getting blocked collaterally, from material deemed objectionable that is being hosted on the same server, or one with a relatively proximate IP address. Its ridiculous, but what can one do? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gato Posted August 26, 2005 at 02:38 AM Author Report Share Posted August 26, 2005 at 02:38 AM Working now. I'll keep quiet now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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