tad_lispy

A weird and disturbing thing is happening on my home network. I'd like some advice on how to diagnose it. My mastodon host (chaos.social) keeps blocking my IP address. I reached out to the admins and they told me it's because they are getting HTTP requests with user agent string claiming it's a Google bot. They shared a following log line with me.

[12/Mar/2025:08:55:14 +0100] my.ipv4.add.ress "GET /@lazurski HTTP/2.0" 403 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

It is my IP address indeed, and the path is pointing to my profile, so it's not random. It also happened while I was browsing Mastodon using Firefox on my laptop. The 403 response is strange, as I was logged in and also my profile is public and viewing it doesn't require authentication. Maybe they blocked it because of the bot signature?

I have no idea what can be making these requests. Certainly not anything I run on purpose. My Firefox uses it's standard user agent header. At home I have a few devices. At the time of this request I believe only the following were on:

• my laptop running NixOS and Firefox (I was actively using it when I got blocked)
• a RaspberryPi home server running NixOS
• my Android phone running Tusky (a 3rd party Mastodon client)
• a broadband router with stock software

I think I can exclude the phone from the suspects, because while the home IP is blocked I use my mobile network connection to access chaos.social and this IP is never blocked. I don't think it's the home server or the router. My suspicion is on Firefox extensions. I only use a few of them:

• Firefox DevTools ADB Extension
• Firefox Multi-Account Containers
• GNOME Shell integration
• Privacy Badger
• uBlock Origin
• Vimium

How can I troubleshoot it? I tried about:logging with networking preset, collected a ton of logs, but couldn't figure out what to do with it. Or maybe it's something completely different? 🤔

Hi! I'm new here and hope to get some help.

For at least 5 hours today I can't connect to https://chaos.social/ (the Mastodon server I'm on). Firefox gives me:

Unable to connect

Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at chaos.social.

    The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
    If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
    If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the web.

From curl I'm getting:

$ curl --ipv4 --verbose https://chaos.social/
* Host chaos.social:443 was resolved.
* IPv6: (none)
* IPv4: 5.9.119.202
*   Trying 5.9.119.202:443...
* connect to 5.9.119.202 port 443 from 192.168.1.45 port 40188 failed: Connection refused
* Failed to connect to chaos.social port 443 after 21 ms: Could not connect to server
* closing connection #0
curl: (7) Failed to connect to chaos.social port 443 after 21 ms: Could not connect to server

It's the same for http, so not related to TLS.

All other websites work normally, but to this particular one I can't connect from any device on my home network (I tired a few laptops, phones and our Raspberry PI home server). I tried to restart the router (Zyxel T-56). No change.

I can connect via mobile network or from a VPS in "the cloud". Also https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/chaos.social.html shows that it's on-line.

I can think of three reasons, but I'm not a networking guru, so maybe it's something else:

1. My router blocks it

   That would be surprising, because it has the stock configuration from my ISP and I definitely didn't tweak anything in last days.

2. My ISP blocks it

   But then it's the same ISP for wired and mobile connection. The latter works.

3. The server is blocking me for some reason

I'd appreciate help in digging deeper, if only to learn.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, individuals and companies alike conceptualized and presented their captivating visions of the kitchen of the future.

Perhaps, in actual fact, posturing on end-to-end encryption is the fig leaf for a lack of investment in education, policing and social care. After all, talk is cheap.