Question

5

Why can I not access imgur.com and gravatar.com from Ubuntu but can do so from Windows?

rated 0 times [ 5] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1753 / 2 Years ago, mon, december 20, 2021, 9:35:56

I have this strange problem, I am unable to access imgur.com from Ubuntu !

I have checked the /etc/hosts file, there seems to no entry related to imgur. I can access it from Windows(same connection).

I cannot ping it or traceroute it, I cannot even ping the IP of imgur. I have cleared iptables too, what could be the cause ?

i cannot access gravatar.com too !! I just noticed that sorry.

Running host imgur.com (the same output with google's dns servers)

gowtham@gowtham-hacktohell:~$ host imgur.com

imgur.com has address 23.23.110.58

imgur.com has address 23.23.110.81

imgur.com has address 54.243.128.92

imgur.com mail is handled by 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.

imgur.com mail is handled by 1 aspmx.l.google.com.

imgur.com mail is handled by 10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.

imgur.com mail is handled by 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.

imgur.com mail is handled by 10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.

Running tcptraceroute

gowtham@gowtham-hacktohell:~$ tcptraceroute imgur.com

Selected device ppp0, address 117.199.141.54, port 44995 for outgoing packets

Tracing the path to imgur.com (54.243.128.92) on TCP port 80 (http), 30 hops max

 1  117.199.128.1  17.534 ms  17.764 ms  17.896 ms

 2  218.248.171.102  93.272 ms  26.393 ms  109.985 ms

 3  115.114.130.49.STATIC-Chennai.vsnl.net.in (115.114.130.49)  49.442 ms  47.180 ms  46.981 ms

 4  * * *

 5  ix-0-100.tcore2.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.39.25)  70.085 ms  69.712 ms  70.361 ms

 6  if-2-2.tcore1.MLV-Mumbai.as6453.net (180.87.38.1)  186.862 ms  186.434 ms  185.515 ms

 7  if-9-5.tcore1.WYN-Marseille.as6453.net (80.231.217.17)  181.965 ms  182.963 ms  184.682 ms

 8  if-8-1600.tcore1.PYE-Paris.as6453.net (80.231.217.6)  186.152 ms  184.483 ms  182.950 ms

 9  if-12-2.tcore1.PVU-Paris.as6453.net (80.231.154.70)  191.271 ms  189.655 ms  188.606 ms

10  if-3-2.tcore1.FR0-Frankfurt.as6453.net (80.231.153.54)  187.245 ms  186.013 ms  193.808 ms

11  xe-0-1-0-6.r02.frnkge03.de.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.9.57)  288.412 ms  281.124 ms  281.011 ms

12  ae-2.r20.frnkge04.de.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.217)  352.432 ms  357.071 ms  357.256 ms

13  ae-1.r21.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.20)  391.405 ms  394.961 ms  391.812 ms

14  ae-2.r00.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.114)  378.128 ms  381.786 ms  385.697 ms

15  ae-4.amazon.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (168.143.232.50)  370.938 ms  353.306 ms  351.793 ms

16  72.21.220.55  361.004 ms * 364.525 ms

17  205.251.245.55  368.187 ms  380.907 ms  375.333 ms

18  * * *

19  * * *

20  * * *

I dial the connection using PPoE.

Capturing the stream through Wireshark, I see this

_{(source: akamaihd.net)}

Running curl

gowtham@gowtham-hacktohell:~$ curl -I http://imgur.com

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: nginx

Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:24:01 GMT

Content-Type: text/html

Connection: keep-alive

Cache-Control: max-age=5, s-maxage=5, must-revalidate

X-Cached: EXPIRED

And telnetting,

gowtham@gowtham-hacktohell:~$ telnet imgur.com 80

Trying 23.23.110.58...

Connected to imgur.com.

Escape character is '^]'.

HEAD / HTTP/1.0





HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: nginx

Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:25:11 GMT

Content-Type: text/html

Connection: close

Cache-Control: max-age=5, s-maxage=5, must-revalidate

X-Cached: HIT



Connection closed by foreign host.

Answers

Only authorized users can answer the question. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

earxcept

Add To Favorites

Follow

Total Points: 310

Total Questions: 115

Total Answers: 111

Location: Japan

Member since Sat, Oct 2, 2021

3 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago jectedrin · Accepted Answer

This may be a MTU path discovery issue. This can lead to certain websites working incorrectly even though all others work fine. It will appear as a time out rather than connection refused. It will only show up with reasonably large transfers like whole webpages - telnet will probably not send any packets which need to be fragmented. It can affect outgoing ssh too.

The fix is to lower the MTU on your network device so that packets above a certain size are always fragmented. See for example:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Adv-Routing-HOWTO/lartc.cookbook.mtu-discovery.html

In detail what happens is that when you send data over the internet it is split up into packets. The maximum size for these packets anywhere on the internet is 1460 bytes not including headers. If you send a message large than that it must be split up, or fragmented.

Now, if your message goes over certain types of internet links it must be encapsulated in another protocol. That means that the packet including headers will get wrapped inside another packet. That obviously increases the size of the packet, so if your packet is already maximum size it must be split up again. However, because this can be exploited to perform DDoS attacks, many routers won't automatically fragment packets that they didn't create. Therefore your maximum size packets won't cross these routers.

In order to avoid this problem MTU path discovery was invented. If a packet is too big for a router it will send back a message saying to send smaller packets. However, it turns out this could be exploited too, and so many routers won't do that either.

So the way to overcome this problem is to always send packets slightly smaller than the absolute maximum. That's what the MTU setting is for. The idea is to set it just small enough that any extra overhead doesn't put you over the limit. Of course you won't know how small that is so you have to find the optimal value (biggest value that still works) by experimentation.