Unable to access website on home connection

[AndrewB]

I’m having a problem accessing the doom9 website and forum this evening on my home connection, but I’m able to access it if I use a VPN like ICloud private relay.

I’m able to resolve the DNS and ping the IP fine, but Firefox is unable to connect to the website.

I did run nmap on the address and it’s reporting that ports 80 and 443 are closed, but port 80 appears open with private relay enabled.

[filler56789]

Have you tested with other browsers, such as Opera or Vivaldi?
Try DISABLING IPv6 in the about:config window.
I had a similar problem between Waterfox and certain sites (not Doom9 though), and the problem disappeared when I disabled IPv6 for Waterfox.
On my Android smartphone I don't use Firefox, but my Opera had the same problem as your Firefox, and yes, VPN was/is a workaround, and I don't know if it is possible to disable IPv6 on Android itself. :confused:

[AndrewB]

I have tried using other browsers, but the same thing is happening.
I don’t think it’s related to IPv6 as the doom9 domains don’t have any AAAA records set when I’ve checked with dig, host and nsloolup.

It appears to me as if my IPv4 address has been blocked by the firewall on the server due to the fact that I cannot access anything on ports 80 or 443 - nmap reports the ports as closed, and they do appear on there.

[Swede]

And you will be continued to be auto-ip-banned as long as you run a searchbot.

[AndrewB]

I’ll be honest here, I have no idea what is causing my IP to be flagged.

I’ve only been visiting the website using Safari or Google Chrome on my iPads running iPadOS 18.

I did run AnyDVD on my computer earlier to decrypt some DVDs, and I had no problems accessing the website before then.

I don’t know exactly what a searchbot is, but I’m not knowingly running a web crawler on my network.

[Swede]

There are three bots that gets autobanned, for a week, if they show up: GPTBot, AhrefsBot and YandexBot
The reason for this is that they have been *very* active from a number of IPs, currently 1194, and don't honor the robots.txt

Like I said, the ban will last for 7 days then you'll be unbanned.

[AndrewB]

So I was able to access the website and forums fine on my computer and iPad after the ip ban was lifted, but I have now been blocked again.

My home ip did get changed by Vodafone on the 8th of October and I was able to access both the main doom9 website and forums until I started browsing the website on my iPad, which then caused my ip to get blocked, first with the encrypted https then the plain http.

I believe that Safari on the iPad does do some sort of pre-caching (even though I've got the preload first search result disabled) which I suspect might look like a bot to the server.

And just to make sure that my pc was not causing the excessive requests, I ran wireshark and had a look for the ip in the interface logs, but couldn't see it.

[JReiginsei]

I also can't access the forum from my Windows PC on Firefox for long periods of time. This time I'm accessing the website from Firefox on a Mac OS computer. I hope that doesn't mean my Windows PC is infected.