Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Calling All Computer Geniuses

There's a fellow posting over at the av123 forum who is trying to decide between Rockets and Axioms. He has a tough decision, because he is located in Oman, in the Middle East, and isn't exactly in a position to order both to compare in his own home. Well he can, but he'd have to mortgage his first born to do so.

His efforts to post here haven't met with success. He keeps getting an error message that reads

"The host you are trying to send the input from is not a valid host."

He has emailed the webmaster here but, as yet, has not received a reply.

Anybody got any ideas?

Tell him to try a proxy. I would imagine that the forums are trying a Reverse-DNS loopup and are failing, thus not letting him on.

You can get that error from firewall software, or pop-up blockers, or a number of other things. I think it happens if you're working from cached pages too. He might try disabling any software firewall he has temporarily and trying to post. Or configuring it to let through anything from axiomaudio. (You should be able to add www.axiomaudio.com as a trusted site.) That could be the problem.

On my system, I have to disable Norton Internet Security before I can post anything. I can read the forum with no problems, but can't post at all without disabling Norton.

It's actually a bit of a PIA when I'm just posting a short sentence or two (like this), but I haven't found an alternative.

Mark, there's no way to configure axiom as a trusted site? Generally that will happen if for some reason Norton is not sending sufficient information to the website in question. Forums have guards in place that require information about the referrer in order to avoid spam postings and such. From my experience, you can configure any such application to get around that problem, be it through preferences or a trusted site listing. If you dig around enough about your Norton app, I would expect that you could find information on how to properly configure it to avoid that problem.

Jack, on my PC, I have the same issue as your friend in Oman and Mark. My solution is the same as Mark's - everytime I reply or send a PM, I need to disable Norton.

If anyone has a clue on how to specifically tweak Norton's settings to avoid this little dance, it would be much appreciated.

Is the problem just with Norton Security? I run Norton AntiVirus alone, which I assume is part of the Norton Security suite, and have no problems.

In my case, Norton Internet Security (the suite which includes Anti-Virus) is the culprit. If I install only Anti-Virus, I don't have the problem. I prefer the extra security, so the whole suite is on board.

This is a Firewall issue, and most likely because of the Referrer Check features built into newer versions of UBB.

I'm not sure what version of UBB this website uses, but I have heard on other forums that in the UBB configuration, there is a Referrer Check feature. The basic purpose of this option is to check legitimacy of the poster, and to protect the board from spamming, etc... I'm not sure if the website moderator is watching, but it appears this problem started on versions of UBB 6.5 or later. In previous versions the referrer check is turned off. This can be disabled in the config utility by the moderator, but really is a security feature that was added. To disable go into Control Panel, go to Master Settings: Primary Settings. On the General tab, expand the Advanced Options (by clicking the + sign). Check the box after "Disable HTTP Referrer Check?" Then save the changes.

More than likely the moderator will not be willing to disable this feature. So the other alternative is for those that have firewalls running on their pc, to check the configuration, as they are all differant, and to allow the Referer Variable.

good luck

Norton Internet Security includes a number of norton products. The one I would look into would be Norton Personal Firewall. I think in that application you can do something like
Options->Advanced Options: "Add site" www.axiomaudio.com
Then try permitting the various options for that site until the problem goes away. There should be something about a "referrer" or somesuch thing which I would expect to be the problem.

The basic idea is that when you move from one page to another, information about the originating page can be passed into the destination page. This is useful for companies that want to make sure you are using the site in the intended way. On a forum this would mean you had done something like made a post from a valid "enter new post" page, rather than carefully constructed a false post and programmatically sent it to the site. That information can also be used to track your movements across pages, which is why some firewalls (like Norton's) block it when possible. I suspect that is what's happening here, and you can always configure such applications to allow certain sites to view that information. It's just a matter of finding the option in the options list.

Edit: looks like I am a hair late. But since we took different approaches to the problem I'll leave this post. I think it's a useful security feature for the forum, and so hopefully by finding that referrer option in their firewalls and allowing it for axiom's site, those people experiencing this problem can get it fixed.

Thanks guys. I'll take a crack at both options tomorrow.

Ditto. To post any messages I have to disable Norton Internet Security.

Ray, just to save you from any potential confusion: The option sirquack mentioned was actually how to configure the forum to not check the referrer information. This does not apply to you, but rather to the forum moderator, who is likely to not configure things that way. The method I mentioned was how, given that the forum requires the referrer information, you would allow your firewall to provide it to this site while still denying it to other sites.

Thanks for the clarification Andy.

You guys are super. Thanks for all the suggestions. I don't know what time it is in Oman, but I'm assuming Nat probably won't be around for awhile yet. Hopefully, this will help him. Thanks again.

In reply to:

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Tell him to try a proxy. I would imagine that the forums are trying a Reverse-DNS loopup and are failing, thus not letting him on.

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Ummm...sure. Why didn't you just say "tqhad hete gyeo ahtewoh, ahgeo hgqwo-DNS wqhwou guoas, thus not letting him on."

Basically the Axiom board is asking "Who are you? Are you who you claim to be?" and his local firewall software stops his computer from replying. Thus, the Axiom board says "POO ON YOU SPAMMER!" and does not allow him to post.

jr

Oh, and DNS stands for Domain Name System. It's a large (if not the world's largest) distributed database. Computers address each other with numbers (usually an ip address like 10.34.45.122). We humans are not all so good at memorizing strings of numbers. But, we do quite well with strings of letters. So DNS translates those numbers in to letters. Everytime you type in www.axiomaudio.com or www.mrbearsvacation.com your computer talks to a DNS server and asks for directions (what IP address) on where to get those two sites.

Comeon spiff, everyone knows that "tqhad hete gyeo ahtewoh, ahgeo hgqwo-DNS wqhwou guoas" is the problem when your computer gives you the blue screen of death and dumps out:

The instruction at 0xdc37a67a could not reference
memory at 0x000f1c1a. The memory could not be written.

Get with it... sheesh.

LOL, what is funny is that I understand this logic, however, most IT people, like myself, forget to speak in Laymens terms for those who are AV challenged Most home environments don't need a proxy server. I'm still pretty sure it is a firewall issue. Also, it might not be a bad idea to check the person's browser security settings to make sure that this website is allowed.

A more accurate analogy might be that he arrives at the axiom border and is asked: "Where did you come from, let me see your passport" To which his firewall replies "Hey passport this, buddy." And the guard sends him on his merry way.

The check is to see that the user is following a logical flow through the site. For instance, if someone knew the format of the http post that is used to post on the site, they could write a program that would repeatedly send that specific post to the axiom server and flood the forum with nonsense, probably without ever even having to log in.

What the check does is something along the lines of: look at the post, and also look at information about what site (and specific page) the post originated from to see if it was coming from a valid submission page from a user who has been correctly authenticated. This is at least my understanding of the process. I think it has very little, if anything, to do with your specific machine or location, but rather everything to do with your online "path" up to your post.

oooh..."mrbearsvacation.com" I may just have to grab that domain name!

That could be a really, really scary thing...

I love it when I get a "Blue Screen of Death"

I wouldn't mind that blue screen of death... and... am I wrong or does it appear that this model isn't wearing much in the way of pants?

You're wrong.

Has anyone noticed that it is difficult to maintain the subject of a thread and, collectively, we have the attention span of a tree stump?

OH... look at the ponyies!!!!

bigjohn

....sniff....is that BBQ I smell???

Beer.

I can't even sit down and listen to a CD all the way through.....my mind starts wandering to things I should be doing... sad, really.

HEY, LOOK! SHINY THINGS!

...kinda explains the avatar huh??? LOL

Yeah, neither ca... I should go wor... hey, shiny thing!

Pickles with cream cheese!

Hate to break up the merriment

Thanks to Ajax for being the OP.

I changes the Norton Firewall and added www.Axiomaudio.com to the list of trusted sites. That did not work and I continued to have the same problem.

I then disables the Norton Firewall altogether. That also did not work.

I then turned off the windows firewall that comes with XP SP2. Not that either.

At the end I switched Windows Firewall on and turned off Norton security. That seems to have cured the problem.

Thanks for all the help.

Glad to be of help, and glad you worked it out. As you can see from the above, you're not the only one that Norton Security prevents from posting. Weird. There has GOT to be a way to set it so that doesn't happen. But, I'm not gonna be any help cuz I don't have the Norton Security suite. Hmmm?

What is bizarre to me is that I use the OS X built in firewall on my laptop, and am usually behind some kind of hardware firewall, be it a PIX, Netscreen, or Sonicwall, and I have never had a problem posting. Norton must be doing something weird. Of course, given that this is Norton, I'm not surprised.

I tried your suggestion for the "axiomaudio" site addition. Didn't work. This Axiom thing is, BTW, the ONLY thing I have a problem with (... he grumbles as he disables Internet Security...).

I have no idea then. I don't have Norton I.S. installed so I can't play around with it to try other options.