Guess what? Nobody is blocking Yahoo Groups

Monday, June 28, 2004

Turns out Yahoo has an internal network problem. The gateway timeout message is coming from a load balancer within Yahoo’s network:

$ telnet groups.yahoo.com 80 Trying 66.218.66.240... Connected to groups1.vip.scd.yahoo.com. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.0 Host: groups.yahoo.com ^] telnet> q Connection closed.

No ISP is blocking Yahoo Groups. Touchtel is (possibly) not running a transparent proxy. It’s all a false alarm, folks.

If you still can’t access Yahoo Groups, you know who the Yahoo people on LJ are. Yahoo’s had an internal network failure for over three days and none of their engineers has ~~detected~~ fixed it yet, while people around the country are blasting their ISPs for censorship.

That said, I still don't know why I can’t access IRC. tcptraceroute gives me 21 hops before it loses track, and this happens only with port 6667. This seems like genuine censorship.

gromhellscream — Jun 28, 2004 1:36:33 PM — # ↩

ISP's seem to be blocking it..try using an external proxy..and see if it gets through..
- Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jun 28, 2004 1:45:08 PM — # ↩
  
  Dude, if ISPs are blocking it, why am I getting a gateway timeout from an IP that resolves to the yahoo.com domain? Are you saying that ISPs are blocking it by allowing the connection to go through but preventing a response? Or is whatever ISP that owns that IP faking an entry at yahoo.com?
  
  It seems to me that whatever is behind the load balancer serving VSNL's network has died.
  - gromhellscream — Jun 28, 2004 1:46:16 PM — # ↩
    
    good point....lets wait and watch:)..did you try accessing via an external proxy anyway?
    - Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jun 28, 2004 1:52:59 PM — # ↩
      
      I'm doing that now and it works, both for Yahoo Groups and IRC.
      - gromhellscream — Jun 28, 2004 1:54:25 PM — # ↩
        
        hmmm..so i guess your ISP is doing something ..funny..
        
        Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jun 28, 2004 1:59:21 PM — # ↩
        
        No, my ISP simply routes to VSNL, which leads to the dead load balancer. The US proxy goes to a different cluster.
        
        With IRC, yes, something is funny, but again far out of Bharti's network. The last responsive hop is inb-1-pos131.be.lambdanet.net.
        
        gromhellscream — Jun 28, 2004 2:00:41 PM — # ↩
        
        hmm i guess its vsnl then.. because i am unable to access groups via my office link also..unless i go through a proxy..:)..so i guess its vsnl..
        
        Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jun 28, 2004 2:10:12 PM — # ↩
        
        Come on, the error message is coming from groups1.vip.scd.yahoo.com. Is that VSNL? The server header in the response says "Server: NetCache appliance (NetApp/5.3.1R3)". kalyan says that is Yahoo's load balancer, not VSNL's.
        
        The fault is clearly Yahoo's. What's the point denying it?
        
        gromhellscream — Jun 28, 2004 2:13:35 PM — # ↩
        
        i am not denying anything..the only thing i am pointing out..is the fact that it works via proxy..means..something funny is happening elsewhere..the yahoo server is working...and since its repeatable..i am not convinced that its the server that's creating the problem.
        
        Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jun 28, 2004 2:21:59 PM — # ↩
        
        Looks to me like the load balancer is doing something funny based on source IP and choking on it. It's very plainly not outside Yahoo's network but somewhere within.
        
        gromhellscream — Jun 28, 2004 2:52:27 PM — # ↩
        
        maybe..but i dont' think so..
mannu — Jun 28, 2004 2:15:33 PM — # ↩

Perennial problems
Yahoo Groups is dying (Score:5, Troll)
achitnis — Jun 28, 2004 3:30:07 PM — # ↩
Dude, get the fundas right. What you are seeing is a connection to your transparent proxy, not groups.yahoo.com.

Don't believe me?

Try this:
```
traceroute -n groups.yahoo.com
traceroute to groups1.vip.scd.yahoo.com (66.218.66.240), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  97.236.1.8  459.561 ms  252.844 ms  253.897 ms
 2  97.236.2.1  268.918 ms  253.870 ms  253.915 ms
 3  202.138.101.49  268.895 ms  412.867 ms  268.907 ms
 4  220.224.184.86  381.608 ms  252.161 ms  269.976 ms
 5  203.199.24.246  538.858 ms  538.763 ms  538.859 ms
 6  202.54.115.152  554.859 ms  712.805 ms  586.842 ms
 7  202.54.2.21  538.863 ms  538.832 ms  586.847 ms
 8  * * *
 9  * * *
10  * * *
```
Now *who* do you think 202.54.2.21 is? The gateway may be different for you, but somehow I doubt it.

BTW - beware of making accusations of anything being wrong at Yahoo. A ton of utterly Mad HooHoos will descend on your head, abuse you and curse you.

In this case, however, the Mad HooHoo would be right - and it can easily be proved:

Set your browser proxy to, say, 208.249.73.231 port 80. Try accessing http://groups.yahoo.com now.

Magic!
- Kiran Jonnalagadda — Jun 28, 2004 3:44:56 PM — # ↩
  
  *sigh* Yes.
  
  I used tcptraceroute and it showed groups.yahoo.com right after VSNL's backbone, so I figured this was an Indian load balancer sitting at VSNL's data centre. Didn't notice it was a Class A (66.*) network that couldn't possibly be directly connected to VSNL.