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

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.