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ANN's site is banned in Russia half of the time because of CloudFlare




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MaxSouth



Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Posts: 1374
PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2013 5:31 pm Reply with quote
Dear Sirs/Madams,

ANN's site uses collocation by CloudFlare, which sells their services just to everyone, not really caring much to whom.

Unfortunately, CF sells its services to Russia's local "Bin Laden" terrorist propaganda resource "kavkazcenter.com". Thus CF's DNS route inquires for ANN data to IP (server), which also hosts that banned site. As result, half of the time when there is attempt to load/refresh a page, it gets routed to "bad" IP and the only thing is you see is the message that this site is banned.

That banned's site DNS (greg.ns.cloudflare.com, nina.ns.cloudflare.com) and ANN's DNS (ian.ns.cloudflare.com, eva.ns.cloudflare.com) are different, but they sometime resolve inquiring domain name addresses into very same IP (net/subnet), on which banned site runs, too.

I am not sure if this can be fixed, but, just in case. The right thing to do would be if CloudFlare got rid of that Bin-Laden site, but since it is not THAT Bin Laden, they would not care or even call this freedom of speech.

But is there chance that CloudFlare would be able to move mirrors of those two sites into different servers at least? Not holding my breath at all, but still.
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Tempest
I Run this place.
ANN Publisher


Joined: 29 Dec 2001
Posts: 10468
Location: Do not message me for support.
PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2013 5:59 pm Reply with quote
Actually, neither ANN nor kavkazcenter are hosted by Cloudflare. CF provides a proxy service (with many benefits), so all traffic to ANN (and kavkazcenter as well as thousands of other sites) is routed through CF proxy servers.

One of the benefits of CF is that it protects the site's servers from attack. Not the main reason we're with CF, but probably the main reason kavkazcenter is.

FWIW, kavkazcenter is hosted in Sweden, while ANN is hosted in Texas.

I'll contact CF about this, I'm not sure how they would deal with an issue like this.
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MaxSouth



Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Posts: 1374
PostPosted: Mon Jan 28, 2013 3:18 pm Reply with quote
Thanks for your help and technical details (my information about the type of CloudFlare services ANN uses is apparently wrong/outdated; in the past, I happen to see their error messages that their caching servers are not connect to the source ANN site, hence they are not able to show the requested page -- and I concluded that they are not simply routing/proxy service, but actually provide mirror/caching servers that get synchronized with your separate server). Though, I doubt that this could be fixed.
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MaxSouth



Joined: 11 Oct 2008
Posts: 1374
PostPosted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 9:14 am Reply with quote
Update: my provider reported me that ANN's domain name currently resolves into two servers: 141.101.124.33 and 108.162.207.33. The latter is where CloudFlare connects not only ANN, but also the banned site, too.

If CloudFlare will stop resolving banned site to this 108.162.207.33 IP, the issue will go away.
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