Today I came to work and found that our office couldn't access the website of the product we sell. I learned that it's happening through out the office. The server is running, the web server up, and I can access it from home. First thing I do, is attempt to reboot our office router/firewall which means I need to wait for everyone to get off the phone. No avail. I find that I can SSH, FTP, and do anything else to the host except use HTTP. Even HTTPS works fine. I do a traceroute to the host, and all routers are responding and routing. Finally, I call our colocation providor. They inform me about a great tool: tcptraceroute.

I use tcptraceroute and find that I'm being stopped at a router in the middle with no reverse dns. Upon a reverse dns I find that this is a Time Warner Telecom router. I call my ISP and ask them if they can lean on TW to fix the problem. They give me a bit of a dumbfounded response, but agree to look into it anyway. I do a whois on the IP of the problem router and call the telephone number listed. After a few minutes en queue, a person answers and assigns me a ticket number for my problem. I give him all the relevant IP's and he agrees to send the ticket to a technician and return the call as soon as there's any updates. I half expected to be calling this number for three weeks and hearing little or no response.

I was operating under the assumption that someone had intentionally blocked us when they received an errant message or something else they hadn't requested. So, I was quite suprised to hear on the way back from my trip to the NC License Bureau that the problem had been resolved. I was even more suprised to hear the phone ring at 3pm and hear a technician on the other end telling me about how a router had been at memory capacity and needed a restart! I wanted to share my very positive experience with Time Warner, and in this situation I wasn't even a customer of thiers. Way to go!