odd lack of some internet connectivity

[gbugbear at gmail.com (Bugbear)]

I am not familar with Smoothwall but does that have any sort of IPS,
application shaping, web filter, or app inspection in it? In my experience
when I have had issues like this it almost always one of these types of
products.

I would put a system on the outside of Smoothwall and see if the issue can
be reproduced - just to rule it out quickly. You can always throw wireshark
inline too but taking the firewall appliance out of the equation would be
where I star.

Doesnt sound like a DNS issue since it saounds like some of the pages are
loading partially and the FTP behavior you described.

Could very well be the ISP and worth a call post taking the Firewall
appliance out of the loop.

Tim




On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 8:15 AM, Robin Wood <dninja at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
> See if anyone can help me with this weird problem ...
>
> I've just been to see a friend at his company as he was complaining
> about not being able to access certain websites or certain parts of
> sites that used to work fine. My first thought was browser or local
> firewall problem so I took my laptop along to eliminate the
> possibility of that being the fault.
>
> After some playing we found a couple of sites (hotmail and part of the
> Ryan Air booking system) that just timed out when we tried to access
> them, this was through my laptop and through their machines. I've just
> tried the same sites 10 mins later at home and they are working fine
> so it isn't that the sites aren't down. I also tried hitting the site
> through netcat and again, it just timed out.
>
> It isn't a http vs https issue as I successfully visited a number of
> sites of both types.
>
> It isn't even just web traffic, the ftp connection they use to publish
> their website allowed us to login and get a directory listing of the
> root directory and change into a subdirectory but getting a directory
> listing of that directory timed out. The same connection works fine
> from my friends home network so it isn't a permissions issue.
>
> I'm at a loss of what to suggest, they are using smoothwall express v2
> between their switch and modem but that hasn't been updated for months
> so is unlikely to be the cause, just in case it was playing up we
> tried rebooting it and the problem still persisted.
>
> The problem has been happening for over a month now but nothing has
> been changed in a lot longer than that so it shouldn't be a config
> issue.
>
> I've suggested talking to their ISP (BT) to see if they can suggest
> anything. Has anyone here got any suggestions of what to try, I'm
> completely stumped!
>
> Robin
> _______________________________________________
> Pauldotcom mailing list
> Pauldotcom at mail.pauldotcom.com
> http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom
> Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.pauldotcom.com/pipermail/pauldotcom/attachments/20081103/5df5d4e1/attachment.htm