IP Address banned?

Hi everyone

Although I can connect to dmoz.org and scroll through the directories and listings as per normal, I just get an error 404 "Cannot find server or DNS error" every time I try a search. Its been like this for two days.

The strange thing is that if I diconnect my broadband connection (with fixed IP address) and connect via a dial-up modem with a different IP address, the search works.

I'm just wondering if somehow my IP address has come in for some sort of ban. I confess that I've been running a lot of enquiries and web reports this week, but no more so than for many years.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

I cannot speak to the "ban" as I don't have access to that information but you might check and see if you are using the same DNS servers on dial-up as on broadband - they are often different, even from the same ISP.

If they are different, try using the broadband DNS servers on the dial-up account. If you can no longer connect then it's a problem with the DNS. Then try using the dial-up DNS on the broadband conenction. If you can conenct this confirms the DNS problem.

Otherwise, some other mechanism is at work, including possibly a routing problem.

The HTTP error 404 does not correspond to "Cannot find server or DNS error" it should only be returned when the server has responded to your request and has determined that the file you're looking for doesn't exist...

Currently, search.dmoz.org is resolving to the IP address 207.200.81.175 for me. You could try to see if http://207.200.81.175/cgi-bin/search?search= responds. If it does, then it's presumably a DNS issue. If not, then there's something stopping your computer for talking to that IP address.

My IP address also seems to be banned, and I can confirm that it is not a DNS problem. If you refer to http://search.dmoz.org/robots.txt, you will find...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/search
Disallow: /cgi-bin/osearch

Which is different than http://dmoz.org/robots.txt...

# Please do not crawl us faster than 1 hit/second.
#
# If you need to examine many dmoz pages, please download the rdf file from
# http://rdf.dmoz.org/ instead of crawling us.
#
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /editors/
Disallow: /World/.m


So I am guessing that if you are engaging in robot like activity on the search portion of DMOZ, that you will most likely be blocked as a robot.