On the woes of ISPs
In a completely different world to my normal professional role, a friend reached out to anyone on Facebook with “Wordpress experience”. My interest was piqued. Britain Kitten, the Spider Lady, was fighting with her CMS.
Apparently, every time she was working on her website creaturecourage.com, it would randomly kick her off. My immediate suspicion was some sort of security model based around IP address that wasn’t working with her home’s dynamic IP, or some sort of anti-virus package. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t recreate it locally: I would have to go on a road trip. A deal was struck: the tarantulas would stay locked up while I worked, and coffee provided. A Devil’s bargain, you may think, but I am ruthless in my deal making: nothing is ever truly for free.
Travelling to her house in deepest darkest Surbiton, I felt upon entering I had travelled to another world. Case in point: I have never debugged a website problem with an albino skunk playing with my toes.

A quick couple of tests and I established that it was nothing to do with Wordpress and everything to do with her ISP connection. Using my own MacBook tethered through my iPhone, I could admin the site without any problem, but on her Windows 10 desktop, the site wouldn’t even connect. Pinging it, I found that her desktop was resolving the domain to a completely different IP address to me: 92.242.132.16. A quick Google for that IP and the results spoke for themselves: complaints about TalkTalk DNS hijacking in conjunction with Barefruit. Ugh.
Lo and behold, her ISP was TalkTalk.
I changed both her router and the desktop to use the “classic” Google DNS servers of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and I could see that ping now correctly resolved the domain, but still the browser couldn’t load it with network refused errors.
Hmmmm.
Carefully, but surprisingly quickly, I transferred the DNS over from the default name provider to CloudFlare, and almost immediately, she was back up and running and able to edit the site. With the site now resolving to a CloudFlare IP address and her router now using different DNS servers, it looked very much as if TalkTalk had deliberately blocked the server IP.
Calling TalkTalk, they had nobody available to help until after 6pm, and I have serious doubts if they’ll ever respond in a satisfactory way as to why the site was on some sort of blacklist.
But at least I got to play with a skunk.
