Ruby on rails (based on Mephisto) - Unable to contact server

Question

I am completely new to ruby and I inherited a ruby system for a product catalogue. Most of my users are able to view everything as they should but overseas users (specifically Mexico) cannot contact the server once logged in. They are an active user. I'm sorry I cannot be more specific, and the system is private so I cannot grant access. Has anyone had any issues similar to this before? Is it a user-end issue or a system error?

Answer 1

If it's working for everyone else then it would appear that the problem is not with Ruby or Rails working, since they are...

My first thought would be to check for a network issue: are the Mexican users all behind the same proxy server and/or firewall?

Is login handled within the Rails application or via some other resource? Can you see any evidence that requests from Mexican users are reaching your web server at all?

Answer 2

Speaking as somebody who regularly ends up on your user's side of the fence, the number one culprit for this symptom is "Clueless administrator". There are many, many sites which generically block either large blocks of IP space or which geolocate and carve out big portions of the world.

For example, a surprising number of American blogs block Asian countries (including Japan) out of a misplaced effort to avoid DDOS attacks (which actually probably originated in Russia or China but, hey, this species of administrator isn't very good on fine tuning solutions). I have to hop over to my American proxy server to access those sites.

So the first thing I'd do to diagnose your problems is to see whether your Mexican users are making it to the server at all, or whether they're being blocked somewhere earlier (router? firewall? etc). Then, to determine whether the problem is on your end or their end, I'd try to replicate the issue with you proxying your connection through a Mexican proxy and repeating the actions they took to cause the issue.

The fact that they get blocked after logging in could indicate that you have https issues , for example with an HTTPS accelerator installed [1], or it could be that your frontend server is properly serving up the static content but doing the checking on dynamic requests only.

[1] We've seen some really weird bugs at work caused by a malfunctioning HTTPS accelerator.

Answer 3

Login is handled by the rails app. Am currently trying to hunt down the logs, taking some time as again I am new to this system. Cheers guys

Answer 4

Maybe INS is cracking down on cyber-immigration.