UPDATE: December 2008, at last, I can now access these pages from the Sussex campus.
I’ll keep this short. For several years now, trying to access any information about Tesco broadband from the University of Sussex network have resulted in Tesco’s servers showing ‘Permission denied’ messages. (click image to see larger version, shows Tesco’s Broadband page in Opera and Lynx, the latter from a server across campus).
Before you ask, I’ve tried different computers, different browsers, and accessing it in different ways, and no, I don’t do anything fancy with my browser setup. I’ve tried it on several computers but all within the same building, but as our web requests go via a central proxy I do not think it should be any different across campus. The message is coming from the Tesco servers, a message from our central proxy servers would appear differently.
I contacted Tesco back in April 2006 but came to a dead end: email one explained problem clearly saying when it happened, reply one said “If you go to http://www.tesco.net and then click on the ‘Internet Access@ tab you will be able to obtain information regarding all of our internet access packages. “. Email two thanks them for their helpful reponse (!) and explained that I followed their instructions and the same thing was happening, I also told them that I had tried different computers and cleared my cache (both trying to show I wasn’t stupid and predict their next move). Reply two asked me to ensure my cookies were on. Email three from me said my cookies were, and then it went quiet and no more were heard from them. I guess passing it on to their web team was just somethnig they did not have an option to do, support centres often seem powerless to handle unusal things or pass things on to the anyone in the rest of the company, which always seems bad business sense to me, my query after all was basically a pre-sales query, this is the time you are meant to at least try to look like you are compentent and value your customers.
I mentioned this briefly in another post a while back, and the only thing I could come up with is that we are www.suSEX.ac.uk (i.e. they block access from sites with suposed ‘naughty’ words in them), but just can’t believe this could be the case. Plus, our IP addresses resovle to susx.ac.uk (the orignal Sussex domain) so it looks even less likely.
So, is anyone else blocked from https://register.tesco.net/online (you can try going to http://www.tesco.com/telecoms/ and clicking on ‘Internet Access’ instead)? Or can everyone else access this fine?
Any one have any ideas?
2 responses to “Tesco broadband : doesn’t like Sussex”
Could it be that Sussex uses a proxy server/cache that messes with the HTTP headers?
Maybe it’s adding a header that the Tesco server doesn’t like.
Try this page to see what’s actually being sent to external sites: http://www.lagado.com/proxy-test
If that doesn’t reveal anything, at least you’ll have something to pass on to the brainiacs among Tesco’s support staff.
Hi Nick
Sussex has a transparent proxy, i.e. I have no proxy settings in my web browser (not even auto detect), but port 80 traffic gets automatically redirected via a set of proxies.
The website you mentioned showed:
The proxy host is stewart.uscs.susx.ac.uk which has ip address 139.184.30.135
The proxy server has announced itself as 1.1 proxy5.uscs.susx.ac.uk:8080 (squid/2.6.STABLE18)
Remote Host stewart.uscs.susx.ac.uk IP Address 139.184.30.135
Request Protocol HTTP/1.0 Method GET
Request Headers
Host http://www.lagado.com
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language en-gb,en;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Via 1.1 proxy5.uscs.susx.ac.uk:8080 (squid/2.6.STABLE18)
X-Forwarded-For 139.184.66.xxx [removed the last 3 digits]
Cache-Control max-age=259200
Connection keep-alive
I think the proxy/cache is certainly an option, but it never has caused a problem before, and our IT services are normally pretty good at doing things properly. Though don’t know enough about http and proxies to know if anything above is considered odd.