This is just a quick note to reassure anyone else who thought they were losing their mind because they thought there was something wrong with their firewall or DNS.
In the end, it actually wasn’t DNS for once. This is not a particularly ground breaking or surprising observation, but good to have solid evidence that this is a thing (no one on the internet seems to be quite sure at the moment).
**edit: I just read through the Tor documentation again, and they do in fact state that this is a possibility, and now I feel silly.**
Last month I started running a Tor middle relay node. I had the bandwidth to spare and I believe in the Tor project, despite it’s reputation, so am happy to donate what I can to it’s operation. You can’t ban hammers because they’re dangerous, ya feel?
Anyway, I was running the node from our residential connection (which is fine since it’s not an exit node), and noticed that we couldn’t access rightmove.co.uk. Some banking apps were also acting strangely, and Reddit wouldn’t load either. From the off I was suspicious that it might be the relay, but only exit nodes cause problems, right?
Well… no. All exit and middle relays are listed publicly, and although sites have to reason to block IPs of middle relays, some do. I guess it’s easier to do a blanket ban than pick out the exit relays. Whatever the reason, it’s a bit annoying.
So I shut down the node and switched our semi-static IP, and rightmove was back. Unfortunate. It’s possible to run a bridge relay instead, which is not publicly listed and shouldn’t have these problems… but that’s a project for another day.
