Forum blocked?

[Everyday_Normal_Engineer]

I am having an issue where I cannot connect to the forum when on my home WiFi. I checked my router and no websites are being filtered or blocked.

Anyone run into this issue?

[RealBlackStuff]

Do you enter https://forum.thinkpads.com or just the name without https://
Try to delete all forum cookies, then restart the browser and try again.
Do you have someone in the house who doesn't like you?

[astral]

This has happened routinely for me too. It happened several months ago and then again last week, not sure if it's fixed now as I haven't tried from home since then. It's clearly some sort of ISP or DNS issue, but it only seems to affect this one site, so it must be influenced by how it's configured, or something specific to it. No other site ever has this problem on my home network.

[RealBlackStuff]

Entering http:// instead of https:// can also cause that!
Beginners mistake.

[Everyday_Normal_Engineer]

Yeah I've tried typing the website in and searching the site and selecting a link to the forum. Both give me an error saying we can't connect to the server.

I just try clearing all cookies, caches and browser history and still same issue. I've also tried different PCs and browsers all same issue.

Its like my IP is blocked when connecting through my home Wi-Fi as I have no issues connecting outside of my home.

Now I did just try connecting through NordVPN and it works! So maybe my IEP is blocked by the forum?

[dr_st]

There definitely is an intermittent problem connecting from certain IP ranges. Could be DNS related. I never have a problem connecting from home (Israel), but from my corporate VPN, which puts me somewhere in Europe - every once in a while the forum is unreachable (can work off and on within the span of a few minute).

[RealBlackStuff]

I see that both astral and Everyday_Normal_Engineer use T-Mobile most of the time...

[TuuS]

I have similar issues, could only load the forum using TOR network but it's working again now.

I agree it was a domain name server issue. Hopefully an update has run it's course but if anyone continues to have issues try using tor browser as a temporary work around.

[astral]

As of a couple days ago, I still am unable to load this website over my home WiFi (AT&T Fiber). Posting now via a different network.

[TPFanatic]

FCC and net neutrality may be a thing to do with it.

[astral]

I doubt it, given this is the only site I have this problem on. It's probably DNS.

[Enig]

DNS ..somewhere?
Have had this issue on my phone using mobile data for a week. Thought it was just me.
Works fine when I connect to home of office wifi.
Tried using it as a mobile hotspot from a laptop. Pinging thinpads.com or forum.thinkpads.com results in unable to find host.

Tried looking it up on MX Toolbox, and would have expected to see an A record for the domain and IP .. but nothing.

Edit:
dnschecker.org sees the domain records for thinkpads.com
A record: thinkpads.com IP:198.136.48.164 TTL: 60

Does that TTL seem unusually low to anyone else?
Also (DNS propagation): https://imgur.com/a/41nlvUn

[Medessec]

Just as added info in case forum admin is monitoring this issue. I've had no issues connecting to the site from both my home internet last week and even my Corporate VPN internet with DHL, but at the Marriott hotel I stayed at in Seattle, WA- it just didn't load at all no matter what I tried.

[astral]

More proof as to it being a DNS issue - I'm typing from my home WiFi right now via my main laptop. I have this laptop set to use the 1.1.1.1 cloudflare DNS. Meanwhile, my phone (using my ISP's default DNS server) instantly refuses to connect to the site.

[755cdxd]

My dns server couldn't resolve thinkpads.com and forum.thinkpads.com starting from Jan 25. I even thought this domain name was taken by lenovo...
So what was it? Where you able connect to a forum using bare ip address?

[Enig]

What ended up being the solution?
It works across all my devices/connections now. It looks like TTL was upped to 300s and DNS propagations looks good too.

[RealBlackStuff]

The problem had to do with the DNS glue records, that needed to be refreshed.
After that the problems should be gone.