After our server upgrade went as smoothly as possible (zero downtime for patrons), we were alerted today that several (5, to be exact) of our clients were not able to access the new servers. After scratching our heads and looking at the problem from every possible angle (I’d like to thank our clients who worked with us on figuring it out), one of our genius techies (i.e. not me) said “it must be the bogon issue – their network administrators should check their bogon filters for the 174.*.*.* address. This network was only recently opened up by IANA. Bogon filters are filters designed to remove bogus IP addresses from being routed or spoofed. This is now a valid network and should not be filtered” (for more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogon_filtering)
And – sure enough – our new servers are on 174.* network and hence the reason why any network with obsolete bogon filter rules had problems accessing them. Even though this was not a LibGuides server issue (nor LibGuides problem in general) we are still bummed out that these 5 clients had their LibGuides access interrupted for part of the day, and we apologize for this – if we could have fixed it immediately we would, but this was out of our hands.
So, this should be a lesson to every network admin out there – keep those network rules and bogon filters up to date – because these obsolete filters not only prevent you from accessing LibGuides, but also from accessing many other (valid) sites who happen to be on this newly-approved 174.* network. The good news is that 98% of our client sites already had these bogon filters updated, but we want to help these 2% get on the train as well 🙂
If you are having problems accessing LibGuides, have your IT folks check the bogon filters for 174.* range – this is most likely the culprit.