403 Forbiden Errors (some visitors)

[MichaelMcC]

I have a strange problem I can't figure out. Some people have mentioned getting a 403 error on one of my sites. The same people cannot send emails to the domain either. Any ideas on this?

Michael

[YvetteKuhns]

Did you check your error logs? Which links are giving the errors? Does this happen when trying to submit a form to your email address? Any other times?

[MichaelMcC]

It's the entire site. As if the people are being blocked by a proxy. I find it hard to believe the problem is here at PW. The visitors swear they are not blocking the site. I suppose the subnet may be being blocked by their ISP. Emails from these same people are not making it with the same error. All these people are from the same general location and might be using the same ISP. Not far from you actually, down in Lancaster County.
How do I go about finding which server the site is hosted. I have 6 sites hosted here and only 1 site is giving the 403 to these visitors.

Post note,
since the server changes here I have no idea where to locate my error logs.

Thanks

[YvetteKuhns]

Post note,
since the server changes here I have no idea where to locate my error logs.

Log into OPS, click Site Tools, click CGI error logs.


It's the entire site. As if the people are being blocked by a proxy. ... I suppose the subnet may be being blocked by their ISP. Emails from these same people are not making it with the same error. All these people are from the same general location and might be using the same ISP.

I have RCN and can test it here. My sister has Enter.net and can test it from there. Do you know what email addresses they are using?

[MichaelMcC]

Exactly, I may have to ask them to send me the entire error message. Have them do a trace route as well. One said he tried to ping the site and it failed.
One of them lives about 10 miles from me so I could take a laptop to their location and check it out myself.
As I said earlier, I don't think it's coming from a PW server. Hmmm, I wonder if a PW 403 error page would have anything on the page to indicate it was from PW. I know when the page was read to me over the phone it never mentioned PW.
Just a puzzle to be solved and I'm sure it will end up being simple.

Thanks

[YvetteKuhns]

I wonder if a PW 403 error page would have anything on the page to indicate it was from PW.

It looks like this:
http://www.autoresourcetoolkit.com/foobar.htm
(Click to see PowWeb 403 error page. My sister's site is hosted here and she does NOT use a custom error page like I do.)

[YvetteKuhns]

Those logs reflect script processing errors, not the errors generated by normal user requests. Currently, there are no error logs.

I noticed that when I logged into OPS. Weird. Anyway, someone could run a script to test for errors.

[djwtwo]

You should be able to see if the 403s are coming from your site by looking at your access logs (log into ops, go to Services > HTTP > Log Files, and use the Compile Traffic Statistics to get logs for the current month.)

The log files are in Apache's combined log format, so the number right after the request in each line is the HTTP response code. You can probably just do a search for " 403 " (that's a space before and after) to find them if they're in there.

Does sound like something (proxy server, ISP, corporate LAN manager) blocking your users and not PowWeb, though.

[MichaelMcC]

Sorry, I was off working. I had seen the cgi error logs already. I'll go take a look at the logs and see if any 403's showed up there.
I did go that that page example you showed and it came up a 404 for me. Maybe you had already removed it.

As far as the emails go, it's only fails for those same people that cannot access the site.

site: www.ejbowmanhouse.com
emails: alice.ey@ejbowmanhouse.com

Thanks

Michael

I checked the logs and it showed no 403 error pages.

[MichaelMcC]

For those interested in the results of this problem.

After these people havng the problem assured me they had spoken to their ISP's and could find no problem there, I walked one person through doing a trace route and sure enough it failed at their own ISP. Contacted the ISP with the IP Addr of the server that it failed at and they fixed it.

It would have been nice had their ISP had actually looked for a problem the first time they were contacted about it instead of just passing it off to me.

Thanks all,

Michael

[YvetteKuhns]

It would have been nice had their ISP had actually looked for a problem the first time they were contacted about it instead of just passing it off to me.

Often support thinks the customers are stupid. Or we think that THEY don't understand or care about the problem or they are too lazy to fix it. They hope the problem will fix itself. Glad to hear that it was fixed.