Unfortunately networking is not my IT special field at all. As within every profession, people also get specialized in one or more fields in IT. I have never had much hands on with networking, and actually no need since I have (and have always had) colleagues who are network specialist.
I think it will be helpful to check the following:
- Are you the only person accessing the forum from AU, who has this problem?
- Are you having this problem at home only, or also at work?
Even if you are not supposed to visit the forum from work, taking a couple of minutes and doing it once, should not cause the world to go under.
If you are the only person accessing the forum from AU who has this problem, and only has it at home, I suggest you confront your ISP provider with this problem.
I checked the same URLs you did using PING and NSLOOKUP in a DOS command window under WIndows XP Professional.
For some URLs there seems to be different IP addresses for the HTTP services than for other services
Substituting a URL with an IP address will however often not work, see below.
"http://www.multimania.de": 213.131.252.238
"www.multimania.de": 213.131.252.254
"http://mitglied.lycos.de": 209.202.254.14
"mitglied.lycos.de" 213.131.252.251
"http://www.lycos.de": 209.202.254.14
"www.lycos.de": 209.202.254.14
udosuk wrote:
I have no problems accessing the two URLS.
Attempting to access any of the "http://213.131.252.251/ascever/Sudoku/......" results in a "403 Forbidden 'You don't have permission to access /ascever/Sudoku/a176.png on this server.'".
Using 209.202.254.14 instead 213.131.252.251 does not really make any big difference.
A network expert told me the following, why substituting a URL with an IP address will often not work.
In your case the complete URL is forwarded to a DNS server at your ISP. This DNS server looks up its known IP address for the URL and sends a bunch of IP packages to that IP address containing your request, including your original URL. The receiving part (in this case Lycos) very probably has a (front end) firewall (actually constructed of a bunch of servers [employing proxies]), which first checks if Lycos wants to talk with your ISP (the transmitting IP addresss) at all.
The IP address your ISP's DNS server knows for a Lycos URL is certainly not the IP address of the server that eventually will process your request, but that of the firewall or even some other network equipment (router) sitting in front of the firewall. The same will be true for any other DNS server outside Lycos' network.
If your request is not rejected by the Lycos firewall, it is allowed to pass. Either the firewall or some other server behind it (in a DMZ) will decompile your URL to ascertain which server will process your request and forward it to it, using this server's IP address, which is normally not known outside of Lycos' computer network.
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