Recently lost all connections to servers

[nzbtuxnews]

Hello,

I have sent a support request to my Usenet providers but have not received a reply yet and I thought to ask here in case some people had experienced this before..

So until a few weeks ago (not sure exactly when), I could connect to all of my 4 servers without problems. Then suddenly, out of the blue, only one still works. I have checked the providers to see if they had changed their server settings (address, port #, etc..) but nothing has changed and they are still operating.

Main servers:
news.supernews.com
Port 563
SSL activated
Connection Successful!

news.eu.supernews.com
Port 563
SSL activated
[Errno 111] Failed to connect: (110, 'timed out') -1@news.eu.supernews.com:563

Backup servers:
usnews.blocknews.net
Port 563
SSL activated
[Errno 111] Failed to connect: (110, 'timed out') -1@usnews.blocknews.net:563

eunews.blocknews.net
Port 563
SSL activated
[Errno 111] Failed to connect: (110, 'timed out') -1@eunews.blocknews.net:563

Could my ISP be the cause of this???

[sander]

I would start analyzing with a manual nntp connection like below.

Code: Select all

sander@flappie:~$ telnet news.eu.supernews.com nntp
Trying 138.199.67.30...
Connected to news.eu.supernews.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
200 Supernews server ready
quit
205 goodbye
Connection closed by foreign host.
sander@flappie:~$

[nzbtuxnews]

What I got is pretty straightforward:

Code: Select all

bash-4.1$ telnet news.eu.supernews.com nntp
Trying 138.199.67.30...

telnet: connect to address 138.199.67.30: Connection timed out

Blocknews have replied a few minutes ago and they suggested to try different port # like 443 or 5563. Neither of them worked.

[sander]

What does

Code: Select all

mtr -rc2 news.eu.supernews.com

give you?

And:

Code: Select all

sudo iptables -L

Post the output here

[nzbtuxnews]

I am not using any IPtables on this machine. Local network firewall is from a pfSense router which I completely disabled but I noticed that the package "IPBLocker" causes huge problems... I uninstalled it and its working fine now.

Anybody using this package on a pfsense router should be aware of its drawbacks.

Thanks for helping troubleshooting this.. I would have never thought about checking this package otherwise..

[sander]

IPBLocker? Running on your Linux, or on the network firewall?

[nzbtuxnews]

Its running on the network firewall...

I realized IPblocker was the cause of it when I looked in the firewall's logs (on the pfsense router) and I saw the IP address (along with the port number 5563) being blocked. then I looked up the IP address of blocknews.eu and found out it was from Netherlands. at that point I thought immediately about IPblocker and sure enough, when I enable traffic from the Netherlands, it works immediately.