Because this this happening? Is some censorship the users of MSX of Brazil?

It would like explanations about this.

[]'s Luciano (aka, Gradius)

http://www.msxpro.com

Don't you think this is a very strange insinuation to make? The MSX Resource Center has been around ever since 1994 and will stay online for as long as we can afford it. The prime objective: to support the MSX community worldwide. Knowing that, why on earth would we deliberately block all South-American visitors from accessing our website? I really don't understand why that is the first option that apparently comes to mind to you and some other people. Trust me, we are not that evil. Have a look at what we have been doing for the past 10 years and give us some credit man, I thought we'd deserve that by now...

You might have noticed we had a rough year, changing hosts rather frequently. The website is generating more and more serverload and datatraffic and thus costs us admins (a lot) more money. Recently we switched to a new, blazing-fast host and until now we are quite satisfied with our new location. However, since about the 30th of March we had a sudden decrease in the amount of visitors. Of course we were wondering where this decrease came from, but we could not find any clear clues on why we were getting less visitors.

It was only until I had a good look into the server-logs and after receiving an ICQ from Ricardo Bittencourt, yesterday morning, when I noticed that we have had close to zero visitors from Brazil, Argentina and other South-American countries that usually are well-represented in our statistics. I instantly remembered a chat a day earlier with Flyguille, the Argentinan developer of MNBIOS who was complaining about his provider, Telefonica, and him not being able to reach our website. I could not believe it, but apparantly most - if not all - visitors from South-American countries were not capable of reaching our website.

Since that moment we are investigating what went wrong. The DNS move to our new webhost went just fine, as people from Brazil and Argentina were able to reach our new server for several days until the problems started. Visitors from all other parts of the world have no problem at all reaching our web host. So, there must be something wrong somewhere between our datacenter (Novaxess) and most, if not all, South-American countries. We are trying very hard to find out where the problem lies, and will try to fix it as soon as possible, but it takes a bit of time. And at the moment, the problem is most likely to be found on the other side of the ocean (from a European point of view) as, once again, we are fully available to the rest of the world and, once again, the DNS move went just as it should. However, I am not the webhosting expert of the MRC, I will have to rely on the expertise of Bart Schouten, Sander van Nunen and, of course, our new ISP. Bart or Sander might post a clearer explanation of the problem later today.

As we all have daytime jobs, college and other personal obligations apart from the MRC things might not go as quickly as it could, but I assure you we will be back to all MSX users worldwide as soon as possible, even if it takes moving to another webhost once again. (Although I don't think that will be necessary).

Forgive me for being a bit annoyed, but every webmaster probably knows how annoying it is to have downtime or availability problems. It hurts when people say bad things about a website you are creating with best intentions, without even considering other, more reasonable possibilities. Without even contacting us to see what's up. We don't bite! Thanks to Flyguille and Ricardo Bittencourt we were able to do some quick tests, excluding several potential causes for this problem.

Either way, I hope we can solve this problem quickly. Meanwhile, you can try and reach the MRC through any free proxy server. Hang in there, we'll be back.

OK, snout, you're very clear.... Don't bother to put any more energy in these explanations! You can use your time for better things, I guess!
(Man, I can't agree more! I really hope people aren't serioius with their conspiracy theories...)

ah, it's strange indeed. but i have it too. chinese users cannot log onto ANY of my services :?!?!? and how the fck could that happen? just as weird... i hope you can find the problem and let someone fix it because i bet its out of MRC's range to fix it.

Just to make clear my position: I hope that the normal service will be soon fixed to allow the brazilian community to use MRC.
I am so sorry for all the crossed messages in the International MSX list. My intention was just to help giving more information to the right people, and I have never imagined such a "conspiracy". So, excuse me if you understood that.

Appart from that, I am a bit worried, because everything that I say tends to be missunderstood. It is public and known that I have some differences with Guyver, but that should be only a matter between him and me. Anyway, in the future I will try to be clearer with my statements, just to avoid confussions.

Thank you everybody and keep MSXing. I may not share all their principles, but the MRC crew is doing a great job for the MSX community, and I would never deny that.

Kind regards,

Edward Robsy

Quote:

ah, it's strange indeed. but i have it too. chinese users cannot log onto ANY of my services :?!?!? and how the fck could that happen? just as weird...

Actually that's very logical.. The chinese government blocks large percentages of the internet. Apparently your IP or domain is within their filter parameters.

Quote:

Actually that's very logical.. The chinese government blocks large percentages of the internet. Apparently your IP or domain is within their filter parameters.

actually its not that logical since certain chello users have problems as well. its not the chinese internet connection but the connection between users and isp. a stubborn chinese government is not the case since a few chinese users can acces a service.

i guess there are quite some more isp's around the world that cause problems like this one. its far beyond the scope of a system administrator and therefore impossible to do something about it.

btw: my first hunch in my case was also that the chinese government is doing stuff that they shouldnt do. until i discovered chinese users that can log on.

depends on what you call chinese... I don't know if Hongkong and Taiwan fall under the restrictions...

status update: we think we have found the problem, but are not completely sure about it as of yet. We hope to have things fixed within 24 hours though...

Congratulations! Good job, MRC crew.

I expect that this won't happen to my site, because I really know *NOTHING* about communications. Luckily ag0ny is a cool hosting provider!

msx master,

Greetings!

Firstly, I thank to have used a little of its time for the explanations. It was not necessary that it was irritated, it would just be enough to say that the problem happened because change of the host provider

I hope the problem is solved shortly. Excuse any upset, it was not this my intention. And forgive my terrible English.

A great hug.

[]'s Luciano (aka, Gradius)

http://www.msxpro.com

As snout stated on the international MSX Mailinglist, which you probably aren't subscribed to, he's had very busy week and he apologises for getting irritated in his post and since he posted a quite similar (if not identical) explanation right there it may have a similar irritated sidenote.

Sorry for intruding a bit here snout, but was just trying to help (and feel free to moderate where necessary).

Quote:

status update: we think we have found the problem, but are not completely sure about it as of yet. We hope to have things fixed within 24 hours though...

and... will you give some details about the problem? im very interested since i have similar problems.

btw: i don't know about whether my chinese users are from hongkong. at least im sure that certain users from outside hongkong (guangzhou) cannot log on. btw: taiwan doesnt count for china in this case.

Last night I added another (3rd) nameserver to the msx.org domain, I also set up that nameserver to be authoritive for msx.org. Since this morning I do get results back from arnet.com.ar. The nameservers at arnet are able to find the domain now and I can also trace msx.org back from argentina (from Centaura network).

Lemme know if things got better now!

ah, ill try to let that chinese mr. use another DNS, obviously one outside china... i'll check it out!