# User Support > Forum Software Support >  still can't open the site

## Randi Gormley

Shortly after you switched over from one url to another (or whatever -- before you redid the site), i had emailed you to say i couldn't bring up the site from my office computer.
at the time, you told me apparently the problem isn't with my office computer or even my company, but with my company's server, as i can and regularly do call up all sorts of sites since i work for a media company and need access to internet information and whatnot for work.
it's been weeks now, but mandolincafe.com/net still doesn't open. is there anything else i can do, or is there something i should be mentioning to the IT people, that could allow me to see this site from my office?

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## MikeEdgerton

The address for the cafe is http://www.mandolincafe.com/

The address for the message board is http://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/

If they know that they know all they need to know. There's nothing technically different about this site.

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## TomTyrrell

Really, I'm not kidding here...

How does one post to this forum without being able to access mandolincafe.com?

I have a real need for this but have never been able to figure out how to do it.

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## Randi Gormley

Hmmmm. i guess i need a chat with our IT people. neither i nor another mandolin player who works with me can get this site from our (differnt) work computers. the screen keeps coming up with 'this site cannot be displayed.' i can't even get it on a google search where it comes up as something within another site. most frustrating.

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## Randi Gormley

(Tom -- if that's for me, i'm posting from home, where i have access.)

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## JEStanek

My Company blocks access to my external e-mail as a means of virus protection.  We also have filters that block access to a variety of sites.  Your Company may have a stricter internet policy and tighter allowable sites than others.

Jamie

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## JEStanek

> Really, I'm not kidding here...
> 
> How does one post to this forum without being able to access mandolincafe.com?
> 
> I have a real need for this but have never been able to figure out how to do it.


Some people are posting via their cell phone or Blackberry device with internet access.  You can only post here if you can get here through some internet service provider.

Jamie

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## MikeEdgerton

> Hmmmm. i guess i need a chat with our IT people. neither i nor another mandolin player who works with me can get this site from our (differnt) work computers. the screen keeps coming up with 'this site cannot be displayed.' i can't even get it on a google search where it comes up as something within another site. most frustrating.



That's your network people filtering access to certain sites, sort of a NetNanny routine. I do the same for the network I control. I do however allow access to the Cafe. Then again, the last time I checked I was the only person going to the Cafe. It's good to be king.

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## Tom C

I once work at a securities company called Essex Corporation. You could not even get to their own web site because they filtered on certain strings like the last 3 letters of their own name.

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## DryBones

what's with the mandolincafe.com/net??? where did the /net come from?

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## TomTyrrell

> (Tom -- if that's for me, i'm posting from home, where i have access.)


Thanks, and dang! I thought you had discovered some magic.

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## Randi Gormley

the com/net was because at one time you could access the cafe by either .com or .net. sorry, that was a shorthand thing i do occasionally, sor of like using s/he when i don't know the gender of someone

i hadn't thought that our filter might be preventing it for some reason or other -- that's kind of disturbing, not from a moral standpoint, but because i'm a newspaper reporter and we're supposed to have access to everything, even porn sites, in case we're working on a story (of course, we have to let the editors know what we're doing, but still).

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## MikeEdgerton

The address www.mandolincafe.com takes you to the Cafe Home Page. The www.mandolincafe.net address takes you to the now read-only old message board. The .com address was always the homepage, the .net address was always the message board. Again, the new message board address is www.mandolincafe.com/forum/ for anyone creating a shortcut.

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## MikeEdgerton

> i hadn't thought that our filter might be preventing it for some reason or other -- that's kind of disturbing, not from a moral standpoint, but because i'm a newspaper reporter and we're supposed to have access to everything, even porn sites, in case we're working on a story (of course, we have to let the editors know what we're doing, but still).


The only other reason you might not be able to get to us would be a DNS issue but you should be getting a Page Not Found message in that case. I'm guessing it's filtered. Do a story on mandolins.

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## Doug Hoople

I work at the headquarters campus of a major software company. About a month or two ago, I noticed that I was no longer able to get to any Mandolin Cafe site from my office computer. Another Cafe denizen noticed the same thing at the same time, and mentioned something to the effect that the Cafe was recognized as a message board and, thus, was filtered to exclude it. 

Seemed plausible. I get through because my cell phone carrier has broadband accesss (just don't ask me to embarrass myself by admitting publicly what I pay for that!). I disconnect from the office network and connect through my cell phone. 

But I haven't been able to get to the Mandolin Cafe through the office network for two months. Everything else is available. GMail is available. My Earthlink Web Mail Client is available. Other message forums are available. I have no idea what it is about Mandolin Cafe that's caused it to be singled out.

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## MikeEdgerton

Your filtering software probably recognizes the new Cafe software, it probably didn't recognize the old software.

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## Doug Hoople

The filtering pre-dated the change to the new message forum. I know that because I found myself, at the time of the changeover, hoping that the new forum might not get recognized in the same way as the old so that it could sneak through. 

No such luck. The filtering prevents both old and new.

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## MikeEdgerton

I was under the impression that you could see the old site.

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## Doug Hoople

> I was under the impression that you could see the old site.


I could, until just about a month or so before the introduction of the new message forum. I'm trying to pin down the date when this occurred, but it's a bit fuzzy. IIRC, it was within a week of one of those DNS burps that we had. The reason I remember it that way is that I recall thinking that it might be a revisitation of the DNS problem and that it would go away. DNS problems tend to clear up in a matter of hours, and they never last longer than a day or so. 

I got my clue that it was a little more structural than that when another poster mentioned the recent introduction of some pesky filtering software at their office. I half suspected him/her of working at the same place I work because of the timing of the observation. 

Sorry I can't get any closer to that. Maybe if I search the archives for the other post.

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## Tim

Same thing here.  About a month before the new site, the cafe went down shortly for some sort of upgrade.  Since then I've not been able to hit the cafe from work.  My work location is on a government (US) computer and I now get a message that the content is blocked due to content violating policy.  The suggestion above that now it is recognized as a message board is the key.  I can currently hit other message boards.

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## Scott Tichenor

It's unclear to me if some of you are waiting for Dan or me to solve these work access issues. I'm sorry but we don't control your employer's access policies. If your employer is blocking your access, you need to take it up with them and ask them to troubleshoot why a publicly accessible web site is blocked. I can think of several reasons of late that would tip off a change to software performing this function on your end: any change in IP address, URL and/or machine readable code that's seen on the receiving end by servers that perform this function. All three of these have changed in the past 30 days.

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## Randi Gormley

Interesting. I was working nights this past week, when IT wasn't available except for emergencies (and although I might consider non-access to the cafe an emergency, i don't believe my company would!), so i'll call them next week and ask for a diagnostic. i do have access to other forums -- our paper runs several of them, come to think of it, and we're supposed to check them occasionally. If I get any answers, i'll post 'em here. Now if only the next mandolin giveaway ended up in my readership area, i COULD write about mandolin cafe!

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## Scott Tichenor

The fact you can access other forums from work and not this one is controlled by your employer. I not it's not what people like to hear, but this site has nothing to do with the lack of access you're experiencing during your work day. If we controlled your employer's access, we'd change it. We don't.

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## danb

As others have pointed out.. work-related filters now know better that we are a message board and might be blocking the domain because of that. There's really nothing we can do about that, it's down to local IT policy. There are some other reasons for not being able to access the board that are technical rather than "policy" in nature, but so far I've not seen any indications of those existing.

So the short answer is, ask your IT department if the site is blocked for internet usage policy reasons if you want to figure out why it's not working from work. That's a likely answer, unfortunately.

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## Tim

Just to be clear, I wasn't asking or expecting the cafe staff to do anything.  I was just trying to prevent someone from a frustrating chase trying to find a technical solution to a policy problem.

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## Doug Hoople

I'm not asking for specific fixes either, although I was half-hoping that there was something identifying in the Mandolin Cafe that is not present in the message boards that we can get at, and that we might figure out what it is and change it. 

It's looking like that was too much to hope for, but it's certainly not a problem that I want to press any further on you good people who run the Cafe. 

My IT department is way too big to get them to even look at this issue (global company, 10s of thousands of employees), and my guess is that if I raised the request, they'd answer a question of their own, "So what are you doing on that message board during your working day anyway?"

Sigh. The one message board I'd like regular access to is the one that I can't get to.

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## Randi Gormley

Update on the access issue:
IT spent some time on this and eventually gave me access from work. hooray!
here's what i was told: the IP address, which they listed as 174.133.252.252, was on a 'black list' of IP addresses because of the 174 prefix. At least for us, the blacklist was of "bad organizations or sites that haven't been released to the public." I wasn't sure what 'bad organizations' meant, but the IT guy said it had to do with something he called a bogon or bogus open network. I don't know if this will help anybody else, but it might mean something to the IT people.

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## MikeEdgerton

Well first off, welcome back. Second, if they are blocking by the first octet in an IP address they have made their jobs very easy but severely limited the places their user can go. Usually they choose a range of numbers to block.

Learn about IP Addresses

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## ApK

Might be a result of outdated or incorrect bogon filtering (a term I just learned today).
Pass this to your IT guys:
http://www.bgp-and-beyond.com/index....-then-....html

General info on bogon filtering:
http://www.team-cymru.org/Services/Bogons/

Looks like not too long ago, it was appropriate to block the entire 174 space, but not anymore.

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## Tim

For what its worth, I didn't try to get the IT staff to change anything.  On a whim I decided to try again from work after a few weeks and was able to connect.  Of course, that could change at any time.  

Still, if you are one of those who couldn't connect from work, it doesn't hurt to retry periodically.

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## recon

I had a similar situation with mandozine.com. I could not access it from home nor work (same ISP). The solution was the same as mentioned here. That is, my ISP had to unblock the IP address.

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