Unable to access SANRAL website using Telkom Mobile

[Ivan Leon]

While the South African National Road Agency Limited (Sanral) website is available to South Africans trying to connect to it through local Internet service providers (except Telkom Mobile), the site is not readily accessible outside the country.

The question of international availability was raised when it emerged that services such as IsUp.me reported that the Sanral website was down, even though South Africans could access the site.

Sanral’s general manager of communications, Vusi Mona, said that the agency decided to only make its website available in South Africa due to cyber-attacks on the site from foreign countries.

The site is also available from Argentina and Austria, Mona said, as some support staff that need to be able to access the site are located there.

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/gover...navailable-overseas-due-to-cyber-attacks.html

 

[ranger]

It is could be that Telkom has a lame DNS entry in their DNS servers. It could be that simple. Run a nslookup from a Telkom network and then one from a non-Telkom network and you will see. Then get SANRAL to ask Telkom to remove the to remove the incorrect entry. Chances are that SANRAL hosted their web site at Telkom and Telkom never removed the DNS entry.

Cheers

BB

No. The DNS resolves (Telkom Mobile uses SAIX DNS, Telkom Internet uses SAIX DNS, Telkom Internet is fixed).

When I tested for Mobile a week ago (when it was still broken), you could not establish a TCP conenection to port 80 on the correct IP address. This was due to a routing problem at Gijima.

See the story about SANRAL blocking "hackers" by blocking access from international. They obviously don't know how to do this properly. They could easily filter on BGP communities (which are maintained by most providers for things like this). But, it seems they are only allowing specific IP blocks (and not ASs or BGP communities).

I personally spent a few hours over about 4 working days on this issue for Telkom Internet, and the only people who were of any help were some of the Vodacom resources and the SAIX resource.

Gijima didn't seem to know why access from our IPs wasn't working, or what fixed it, they apparently "restarted something" and it worked.

The last communication I saw regarding Telkom Mobile was when they asked *US* to test for them (so we tethered a smartphone with a Telkom Mobile SIM to test for them, while we had lots of other crises to attend to.

 

[Ivan Leon]

Looks like the SANRAL website is back online again as of last night (21/01), after their system shut down yesterday due to the 'anthrax powder' scare at their head offices, which required the power supply to be shut off.

 

[j4ck455]

Looks like the SANRAL website is back online again as of last night (21/01), after their system shut down yesterday due to the 'anthrax powder' scare at their head offices, which required the power supply to be shut off.

Are you saying that the problem was resolved when SCAMRAL's operations centre was given an enema in the form of all the employees being evacuated from the belly of the beast and hosing them down with water which ultimately stopped them from manually picking and choosing which packets to allow through?