Sunday, March 18, 2007

Technical problem

Can anybody shed any light on this. One of the sites I link to is The Welfare State We're In, the site associated with James Bartholomew's book of the same name.

For weeks I have been getting this message;

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.thewelfarestatewerein.com Port 80


I wrote to James asking him what happened to his site and got this reply;

Dear Lindsay,

something technical happened which I fear I do not really understand. I lost
the ability to get to the website myself but then I was able to get it
again. I think it may have had to change server or something like that. I think most Internet Service Providers have found it on the new server but I guess there may be some which have not. But frankly I don't understand how it works so I might have got the wrong end of the stick. Anyway the site is still up and running.

best wishes, James

Any ideas?

5 comments:

peteremcc said...

What is happening is similar to when someone moves house and the post office doesn't bother forwarding mail. It sounds like there is a problem at your ISP and they aren't sending your computer to the right place to see the website.

You could either contact them and tell them about the problem - they should be able to fix it at their end - or you could give Open DNS a try.

http://www.opendns.com/

Open DNS is basically a free version of what your ISP does (directing your computer to the right servers/websites/pages) that anyone can use.

Their website is pretty good so you should be able to figure out how to set that up. Of course, there is always the chance that they are having the same problems as your ISP - i'm not currently using Open DNS so can't check.

Berend de Boer said...

Your post isn't really clear nor is James answer.

Does James actually say he moved his server?

I can't access his server either, nor from New Zealand, nor from the US.

So it isn't your fault, it is James fault.

I would need a lot more details to tell where the problem is, but I can assure us it is not us.

Anonymous said...

I am in the UK. I have tried clicking on the link - 404 error.
James's site is not "up and running."
regards,
Michael.

peteremcc said...

Thats interesting that other people are having trouble too.

I WAS able to access the site through a proxy in the UK yesterday when I posted my comment.

Anonymous said...

For what it's worth I did get on there the other day and tried it again just now and got on. But then I'm accessing from within the UK so maybe that makes a difference. But it's working for me.