"Access denied" opening any discussions.apple.com

OK, the problem has been solved, after much back-and-forth between my Internet provider and Apple support. It turns out that Apple's discussions forum subscribes to at least one Internet blacklist service (that identifies malicious or misconfigured IP addresses),either SORBS or Spamhaus. Verizon, it turns out, randomly assigns IP addresses to users using DHCP, and my network was assigned an IP address that, at some point, had gotten itself added to the SORBS or Spamhaus blacklist.

So, every time I visited discussions.apple.com I received an Access Denied message, but only from my home network. Kudos to the support rep who had this idea (after the Support Community support reps apparently didn't, and Verizon certainly didn't). Because DHCP assignments are generally renewed if you use them without interruption, I kept the same address, and kept getting Access Denied.

When I asked Verizon to break the lease on the IP address, and then left my router off for about 12 hours, I was assigned a new IP address which (as you can see) allows me in to the discussions forum.

Of course, some other hapless Verizon user will get assigned that address, and will be blocked, but that's Verizon and Apple's problem for using an apparently unreliable blacklist.

Hope this solution helps someone... I'm back where I need to be. Thanks for all the help from the community.

I only noticed it four days ago (6, now). It may have been going on for a while, but I only visit discussions.apple.com when I have an issue to research.

I have tried this on four computers, multiple browsers, multiple networks (clearing the cache and flushing DNS when possible along the way) with the following results:

1) iPhone: Verizon FiOS, Access Denied. Cellular Data network (AT&T): opens the page fine.

2) MacBook Pro: Verizon FiOS, Access Denied. Tor (proxy): Sometimes fine, sometimes Access Denied, possibly because of different exit nodes.

3) Mac Mini: same as (2).

4) Lenovo Thinkpad: Verizon FiOS: Access Denied. VPN to large corporate network not served by Verizon, opens the page fine on all remote machines I've tried, in all browsers.

This suggests that it's a Verizon FiOS issue, and I continue to talk with them, but they're seeing the failure outside of their own network when I traceroute to discussions.apple.com. Possibly it's a Verizon > Akamai issue, or an Akamai > Apple issue, or it's a glitch that will require all three companies talking to fix.

I would be interested to see what happens to other Verizon FiOS users in my neighborhood or town visiting discussions.apple.com, but I haven't been able to try that yet, and Verizon hasn't tried that, or doesn't know how, or something.

Any chance that an Apple representative will see this and forward it to some server or networking team that will know what's going on? Probably slim to none. But you asked, so I'm answering. :-)

Mike

I'm not sure if it will be helpful, but here's the usual traceroute:

mstockman% traceroute discussions.apple.com

traceroute to e4233.a.akamaiedge.net (23.33.249.54), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 wireless_broadband_router (192.168.0.1) 0.937 ms 0.804 ms 0.532 ms

2 l100.bstnma-vfttp-92.verizon-gni.net (98.118.39.1) 8.379 ms 6.486 ms 7.910 ms

3 g0-10-2-7.bstnma-lcr-22.verizon-gni.net (130.81.189.98) 9.300 ms 20.215 ms 13.571 ms

4 ae4-0.bos-bb-rtr2.verizon-gni.net (130.81.151.84) 8.482 ms

so-5-0-0-0.bos-bb-rtr2.verizon-gni.net (130.81.151.220) 7.211 ms

ae2-0.bos-bb-rtr2.verizon-gni.net (130.81.151.76) 9.570 ms

5 * * *

6 0.ae2.xl4.bos4.alter.net (140.222.226.19) 12.254 ms 26.823 ms 10.285 ms

7 0.ge-9-3-0.gw15.bos4.alter.net (152.63.24.54) 9.744 ms 9.823 ms 9.485 ms

8 * * *

9 a23-33-249-54.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com (23.33.249.54) 16.007 ms 11.280 ms 13.003 ms

Verizon was convinced that the issue isn't theirs because the timeouts occur after the 4th hop, which is after (they tell me) it leaves their network.

As for the page source, it's very, very sparse. Pure HTML, without any links, styles, Javascript, or even proper headers... it's just <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> etc. in all caps, as if it were written in the 1990s. Oh, and the code wouldn't even validate, since there are unclosed <P> tags and such.

So, not too helpful.

Regarding the suggestion to submit this to the Apple feedback form, I've done that, and spoken with tech support. Apple support says it's Verizon's fault, which is possibly true. The feedback form has never, in my experience, ever resulted in any kind of response from Apple. So they may have seen it, but I have no way of knowing.

It would be nice if the three companies involved in this connection would talk to each other to solve the issue...

Thanks for the suggestions all, and I'll keep plugging away with Verizon.

Thanks. I have several workarounds, and Tor was one that I had already tried (that worked, you're right). But the workarounds don't address the real issue... either Verizon, Akamai, or Apple have a bug that I can't fix, and I can't get any of the companies involved to talk about how to solve the issue.

And yes, it's still happening on day 4.

Unfortunately, I've done all of those troubleshooting tips and more, *except* for the part about finding a neighbor with FiOS to see if they have the same issue. That would be helpful, but so far I haven't found such a neighbor... the ones I've spoken with all use Comcast unfortunately.

Tor works by routing the connection around the globe and exiting to reach discussions.apple.com from someone else's network, so the intermittent success makes sense. I'm definitely leaving my own FiOS network, but I have no control whose network I end up making the connection from.

The VPN connection works only because I'm using VNC or Remote Desktop to actually connect to a computer in the office (as I'm doing to post this reply). So I'm bypassing Verizon's network altogether.

In all honesty I'm still suspicious of Akamai but I would expect that they perform regular network quality tests and would have caught a major routing problem like this by now. But I may be overly optimistic about big corporations :-)