FAH downloads blocked by IP policy

[gchristopher]

Hi,
This happened a whileback too, but basically I am unable to run any of my little "farm" now without configuring VPN on each machine. Everything was working fine within the last week but now all my agents' workloads get stuck on "download".

I strongly suspect this is related to cloudflare or other rules that may be targeting parts of Asia (especially Russia); I am connecting from Japan.

Can you like... call off the dogs?

[Joe_H]

As far as I know this is not something connected with F@h. More likely it is caused by either your ISP or by an institutional firewall setting.

[gchristopher]

Well I just want to be clear that this happened less than a week ago. Also, there are similar posts about other kinds of blockages happening at cloudflare.

So it depends on how your cloud service is set up for FAH whether "intelligence feeds" are impacting you.

As an example:

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/site ... ues/222384

I wonder if others are experiencing this since the invasion?

[Joe_H]

Exactly which server names or IP connections are being blocked? The WU download connections are IP number based, no domain lookup involved. Those servers are also not on Cloudflare, but physical servers located at various members of the F@h Consortium.

[gchristopher]

Ok that's good to know they are physically onsite/being hosted. A system such as cloudflare could still be used but that is not likely.

Of course now, magically the systems are working.

Looks like the problem was happening when connecting to assign<x>.foldingathome.org. Here is a sample log:

01:33:26:WU00:FS00:Connecting to assign4.foldingathome.org:80
01:33:26:WARNING:WU00:FS00:Failed to get assignment from 'assign4.foldingathome.org:80': 10002: Received short response, expected 272 bytes, got 0
01:33:26:ERROR:WU00:FS00:Exception: Could not get an assignment
01:48:53:FS00:Paused
01:49:23:Removing old file 'configs/config-20220206-151405.xml'
01:49:23:Saving configuration to config.xml
01:49:23:<config>
01:49:23: <!-- Folding Core -->
01:49:23: <core-priority v='low'/>
01:49:23:
01:49:23: <!-- Folding Slot Configuration -->
01:49:23: <cause v='COVID_19'/>
01:49:23:
01:49:23: <!-- Network -->
01:49:23: <proxy v=':8080'/>
01:49:23:
01:49:23: <!-- Remote Command Server -->
01:49:23: <password v='*****'/>
01:49:23:
01:49:23: <!-- Slot Control -->
01:49:23: <power v='full'/>
01:49:23:
01:49:23: <!-- User Information -->
01:49:23: <passkey v='*****'/>
01:49:23: <team v='256955'/>
01:49:23: <user v='gchristopher'/>
01:49:23:
01:49:23: <!-- Folding Slots -->
01:49:23: <slot id='0' type='CPU'>
01:49:23: <cpus v='8'/>
01:49:23: <paused v='true'/>
01:49:23: </slot>
01:49:23:</config>
05:17:40:ERROR:Receive error: 60: Operation timed out

Now that I have dug a bit deeper as to what is getting connected to, I'll try to do more diagnostics next time it happens.

Thanks for the responses.

[gchristopher]

Also note that the problems weren't occurring in the DNS service. CloudFlare does have the capability of doing that of course, but there are other things such as firewall rules that can be used to sense and block IP streams. This browser (firefox) does use cloud flare DNS to sanitize the sites it visits. That is not what was happening.

[toTOW]

FAH servers are not behind CloudFlare. For instance, assign1 is pointing to an IP which is at wustl.edu (Washington University in Saint Louis) ...

Can you access the following links in your browser :
http://assign1.foldingathome.org
http://assign2.foldingathome.org
http://assign3.foldingathome.org
http://assign4.foldingathome.org

How do you connect to the Internet ?