Thursday, November 05, 2009

pernicious python.org proxy problem

For the past few weeks, I haven't been able to access python.org or any of its pages through a proxy server. My workplace has one standard proxy server, and I also use a personal machine as a SOCKS proxy for an SSH tunnel - and both of them have been getting name resolution errors for all python.org sites. I haven't seen it for any other sites, or when using no proxy.

Does anybody know what's going on? Is there something about python.org that would make name resolution work differently for it?

[EDIT: Friends from the Dayton Dynamic Languages SIG figured this one out. My primary workplace proxy server is blocking DNS lookup on the python.org domain. Trying to use a different proxy through a SOCKS/SSH tunnel produced the same DNS failure, because - to my surprise - by default, Firefox does not make its DNS requests through the SSH tunnel even when all other traffic is tunneled. The network.proxy.socks_remote_dns preference must be set to change this. See "Proxy Firefox through a SSH tunnel".]

1 comment:

Michael Hudson-Doyle said...

I have intermittent problems with python.org too -- I think it's something to do with the fact that python.org has an IPv6 address and my dsl modem can't cope with this. You could maybe check this by seeing if you have problems accessing www.lca2010.org.nz too.