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An experience with weird internet connectivity and proxies

I forgot to mention this earlier, I noticed something very strange was happening when it came to federating with servers within Europe. Mainly southern Europe.

I could contact them but for some reason they didn’t have connectivity back to me, none of their IP addresses (or ranges) were being blocked by CFS or any of the blocklists when queried.

Theoretically I should have been blocking them, but weirdly I wasn’t and honestly other than my ISP doing filtering of my traffic (which is entirely possible) I can’t explain why.

a man thinking “this is strange” AI concoction an AI generated man thinking “that is strange”

Since I have an absolute fuck tonne of free credit left with DigitalOcean, I decided to test that theory that my ISP was up to some shadow filtering and what I found next is shocking and I was shocked like Elisabeth Borne at the Assemblée Nationale.

Elisabeth Bourne also shocked by the obvious

I spun up a small droplet in Amsterdam and created a replica of the relays in Bangalore and Sydney then funneled all EU and “unknown” traffic to it.

Once the DNS propagated, these servers were able to recontact me and I saw a few more that began to show up in the AMS3 logs. It does seem there is some shadow things happening in the background and I also noticed this in the past when MX Guarddog was reporting a Cisco device on my mail ports.

It looks like I’ll probably keep this setup for Plume, just have it traffic via the relays and anything else I self host I’ll just take those punches since my gopher1 and gemini2 servers aren’t super critical on incoming connections and nobody has really noticed there was a problem (it could just be they filter 80 and 443 ports for bots).

  • 1 : gopher://oh.mg:70/1
  • 2 : gemini://oh.mg