On my site, tsptalk.com, I have links to pages on the government site www.tsp.gov. Until a week ago, these links worked fine. Now I get the error page... Forbidden You don't have permission to access /rates/share-prices.html on this server. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Apache/2.0.49 (Unix) mod_perl/1.99_14 Perl/v5.8.4 DAV/2 Server at www.tsp.gov Port 80 Yet if you take the link and cut and paste it into a browser manually it works. So they are blocking links from my server? What's up with this? Any ideas, suggestions or comments? If you want to try it, the links are on any of my pages about 1/3 of the way down on the left side in the "TSP Links" menu. Thanks!
As of about 8:40 p.m. Pacific Time, I was able to satisfactorily load pages from the links on your page. The condition may have been transitory, or they may have woken up. I suspect that they have no right to block you if you are not grossly abusing their service, and I don't think an unusually heavy load is abuse. If this recurs, consult a lawyer expert in governmental matters: they may have made your fortune for you.
Interesting, because I still get the error page. Did you use the links under "TSP Links?" Thanks for your help!
I go to your site, click on the links in the column in the left, under "TSP Links", and they all work fine. That's all I can say.
Here are the IPTRACE records: GET http://www.tsp.gov/rates/share-prices.html HTTP/1.1 Host: www.tsp.gov User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040212 Firefox/0.8 Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/png,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.tsptalk.com/ HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:23:31 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.49 (Unix) mod_perl/1.99_14 Perl/v5.8.4 DAV/2 Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 95061 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <!-- saved from url=(0037)http://www.tsp.gov/rates/summary.html --> <HTML><HEAD> <TITLE>TSP Rates, Share Price History, 2004-02-12</TITLE> [etc. etc.]
I truly doubt your site is being blocked. They have the following notices posted on their site. I would guess it is related: Special Notice: Because the financial markets will be closed Friday, June 11, 2004, for the National Day of Mourning for President Reagan, TSP share prices will not be updated and transactions will not be processed until the following business day (June 14). Special Notice for June 11, 2004: Due to hardware maintenance, Account Access will be unavailable between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., eastern time on Friday, June 11th. Due to system maintenance updates, some of the transactions in Account Access may not be available from 5:00 p.m., eastern time on Friday, June 11th, to 1:00 a.m., eastern time on Sunday, June 13th.
It looks like you are being blocked either based on referrer or maybe on IP. This may well be the intrusion detection software as your site would show significantly more than average referrals. It might be best to contact them and explain what you are about. You may be given a "key", be loaded to a special table or be given an alternative entry point - at least that is what I've done in the past when agressive IDS looked out genuine referrers. I assume you have not contacted them before to smoothe the way? I run IDS on some sites and this automatically bans heavy referrers as suspected intrusions. I do get a list but quite frankly if it's not a genuine public proxy or I do not get contacted I leave these in. It also sometimes happens that shared IP's get blocked and this does often happen where a new site is released under shared IP's that may misbehave having nothing to do with the other websites. M
Thanks. I wonder if there is a way to cloak that "Referer:" It's been going on for about a week now and that message came out Thursday and is a normal message given during holidays. Not so coincidentally, someone under the email address ...@tsp.gov, obviously an employee, joined my email alert service about the same time this strated happening. This is intentional. That is odd, but good to know. Thanks expat! I quess I'll have to try to contact them. They are not always eager to help. I emailed them twice when I started the site to see if it was OK and they never replied. I did send an email the other day, so far without response, but I may have to wait for Monday to hear back. Thanks again for all your help.
I get the forbidden message as well, but the links work fine when typing them directly. Certainly seems like there is some kind of block in effect... Geir
Kind of. I ended up using java scripts (href="JavaScript:window.location='http://www.tsp.gov';") and it got by the problem, but a couple of days later I received a FedEx letter from tsp.gov telling me the links "must be discontinued as of the close of business on...". Their problem was that the links went to pages within their site and people could be confused thinking it was a tsptalk.com page and not tsp.gov. Pretty dumb but I complied. They said I could link only to their home page with written permission after I made their requested changes. Thanks for asking.