Overly-Aggressive Firewall; Fixed
A very nice gentleman from India, Bejoy (VU3BOJ), had contacted me recently;
informing me that he was unable to access my various web resources. The poor
guy was attempting to install my
W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software, but to no
avail.
Moreover, Bejoy mentioned that his local friends with different ISPs were also unable to access my resources. This bothered me, so I investigated.
The problem turned out to be an IP/ISP reputation list (automated) on my firewall, which auto-blocks certain “known” IP blocks, IP hosts, etc. when nefarious or other non-kosher activity has been detected and/or reported. While this is a handy feature, it also seems a bit over-aggressive, and it obviously suffers from some sort of false positives.
I ended up spending quite a few hours auditing the firewall logs, looking for additional false positives, then tweaking the rule-sets so folks aren’t falsely blocked. I also reported the issue upstream to the list maintainers and developers.
I apologize if you’ve had any issues accessing my resources. The problem was
resolved and I’ve confirmed it with multiple users today.
Thanks to Bejoy, VU3BOJ for informing me…as he has indirectly helped many
other users of my software and resources. 🙏