IP ranges from The Planet will be blocked

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Alex Payne

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Jan 5, 2009, 5:05:43 PM1/5/09
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Our operations team has informed me that we'll soon be blacklisting
IPs originating at hosting provider The Planet
(http://www.theplanet.com/). We've attempted to resolve a number of
abuse complaints with them over a long period of time and have not
received an acceptable response. If your service or application is
hosted at The Planet, please be aware that this will impact your
ability to talk directly to the Twitter API.

--
Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x

zbowling

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Jan 5, 2009, 5:21:45 PM1/5/09
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NOOO... :-)

My 3 servers are at The Planet. They are the worlds largest managed
hosting provider so its a significant chunk of the internet so I'm
sure there will be an outcry.

Can you whitelist my range?
70.86.83.50-70.86.83.63


Zac Bowling
http://zbowling.com/

Alex Payne

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Jan 5, 2009, 7:17:41 PM1/5/09
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Unfortunately, no, not until we hear back from The Planet.

Mike Scott

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Jan 5, 2009, 7:29:29 PM1/5/09
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Oh don't you just love corporate hostility. Bureaucracy at its best!

Dharmesh

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Jan 5, 2009, 11:22:08 PM1/5/09
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I don't think this is really corporate hostility or bureaucracy on
twitter's part. They're simply trying to address a case of abuse --
which ultimately impacts their ability to deliver service to their
users.

On Jan 5, 7:29 pm, "Mike Scott" <mic...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh don't you just love corporate hostility. Bureaucracy at its best!
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Alex Payne <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately, no, not until we hear back from The Planet.
>

Randal Hicks

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Jan 6, 2009, 3:47:06 AM1/6/09
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HEAR HERE!

...spot on Dharmesh.

Abuse issues of any kind are handled at an ISP level. If the ISP is
uncooperative you block that range as it's the ISP's responsibility
to manage their subscribers (which is why large chunks of China,
Russia, and the Ukraine have found their way into my firewall
rules). Responsible ISP's can quarantine the user(s) so in this
instance, unfortunately, anyone from this ISP will be impacted by
Twitters logical decision. Perhaps when enough customers from The
Planet complain that ISP will have no choice but to resolve the abuse
issue which began this mess... and if not Zac, maybe it's time to
shop for a new hosting provider?

RandaL

Mike Scott

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Jan 6, 2009, 5:26:27 AM1/6/09
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Oh no, I commend Twitter as well. I was talking about the planet.
Twitter is not a corporate... not yet at least.

Chris Scott

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Jan 6, 2009, 8:10:39 AM1/6/09
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On Jan 6, 2009, at 3:47 AM, Randal Hicks wrote:

>
> HEAR HERE!
>
> ...spot on Dharmesh.
>
> Abuse issues of any kind are handled at an ISP level. If the ISP is
> uncooperative you block that range as it's the ISP's responsibility
> to manage their subscribers (which is why large chunks of China,
> Russia, and the Ukraine have found their way into my firewall
> rules). Responsible ISP's can quarantine the user(s) so in this
> instance, unfortunately, anyone from this ISP will be impacted by
> Twitters logical decision. Perhaps when enough customers from The
> Planet complain that ISP will have no choice but to resolve the
> abuse issue which began this mess... and if not Zac, maybe it's time
> to shop for a new hosting provider?

Based on The Planet's past handling of email spam abuse (which I would
think would be orders of magnitude greater than Twitter abuse) a new
provider would be a good thing. Sad to say, but I had servers at The
Planet for a few years as recently as a few months ago and routinely
ran into email blocking on their IP ranges due to lack or response for
well-documented and ongoing abuse from servers they host. I did have
a couple good experiences with their abuse staff years ago but I think
those days are long gone.

--
Chris Scott
http://iamzed.com/
http://hailtheale.com/

jstrellner

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Jan 6, 2009, 8:57:59 AM1/6/09
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I commend you guys on this. We've had servers with them for years
(all the way back to when they were still primarily an ISP -
Everyone's Internet), during that time they went to complete crap.
About 6 months ago I canceled all of our servers there because how
crappy of a provider they are (no small feat to do that either, took
them months to do it).

They may be the worlds largest, but they are also the worst. Again, I
commend you guys - don't cave to the pressure to re-enable them.

zbowling

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Jan 6, 2009, 11:13:33 AM1/6/09
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Is block at a routing level that you or is it going to be an API
level? What I'm wondering is if read only access to my updates will
still work. I have features of my various blogs that update to twitter
but more importantly they show my twitter status.

Also a few of my development tools I've written for Twitter I host at
The Planet.

I'm not really setup to move at the moment. Been with The Planet for 4
years (my servers up times is are at 2.5 years now).

The only problem I ever have is that someone outright blocks the IP
range. The Planet gives benefit of the doubt to its customers usually
and that is because of their uptime guarantee policy because if they
pull everything that has an abuse claim and it turns out to false (and
in many cases hard to prove) then they would have to pay for the
downtime. A lot of customers are hosting their own shared or VPS
hosting solutions at The Planet, so many times the violators are
customers of customers so it takes time to trickle down.

Before the EV1 and The Planet merger (to create the new "The Planet"),
I was with the old The Planet. In that system, the second there was an
abuse claim, I got an email and their support engineer called me. That
system is still in place but they no longer call, they just email
apparently (but its been years since I got an abuse claim). You have a
few days before they take action. In fully managed servers, they may
login and try to resolve it if you allow them and post change of
management procedures.

I'm curious though. The rate of issues maybe directly correlated to
the size of The Planet. They have over 8 data centers in Houston and
Dallas (I've visited 3 of them here in Dallas when I used to have a
private rack). I would estimate they have well in excess of 200,000
servers guessing from the size of the data centers I seen. They pretty
much own 2 floors at the Infomart here in Dallas (http://
www.infomartusa.com) and when they grew out of that, they built a huge
build across the street.

I don't know. A single customer like me doesn't have a lot of weight
to push an organization like this and I don't want my access to
Twitter to get yanked.

Can you whitelist my range? 70.86.83.50-70.86.83.63


Thanks
Zac Bowling
http://zbowling.com/

KHazard

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Jan 6, 2009, 11:35:37 AM1/6/09
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After coming across this thread, I've been investigating the abuse
reports on The Planet's side. We located a complaint sent yesterday
but were unable to locate any other complaints from the address
sending the complaint or any other twitter.com email ... The complaint
was responded to with a thorough, non-canned response requesting
evidence and we haven't had any additional responses to investigate
any further. If you have a chance, can you follow up with the abuse
deparment's response to your initial report?
> much own 2 floors at the Infomart here in Dallas (http://www.infomartusa.com) and when they grew out of that, they built a huge
> build across the street.
>
> I don't know. A single customer like me doesn't have a lot of weight
> to push an organization like this and I don't want my access to
> Twitter to get yanked.
>
> Can you whitelist my range? 70.86.83.50-70.86.83.63
>
> Thanks
> Zac Bowlinghttp://zbowling.com/

Alex Payne

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Jan 6, 2009, 1:52:03 PM1/6/09
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I've put our operations staff in touch with someone from The Planet.
We'll see what happens!

mservice

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Jan 7, 2009, 9:26:37 AM1/7/09
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If you are worried about losing your twitter capability at The Planet,
then you should consider moving over to Rackspace. We moved all of our
servers and clients servers (in excess of 50 servers) to Rackspace and
have been using them since 2003 and always get great support -
"fanatical support". Their account teams and their solution partners
make the migration process simple and always go above and beyond. You
won’t have to worry about losing your Twitter capabilities again.

Terry Jones

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Jan 7, 2009, 9:51:19 AM1/7/09
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A little off-topic:

Have Twitter detected abuse coming from Amazon EC2 IP address ranges?

I'm not building a Twitter app, but I'm very curious to know what the
reputation of Amazon's IP blocks is like. I imagine Amazon have plenty of
EC2 instances running code written by evildoers. I wonder what they're like
at reacting to reports of abuse etc. This also includes people using them
for SMTP (of course).

Terry

Jeremy Darling

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Jan 7, 2009, 10:01:11 AM1/7/09
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If you like Rackspace, and don't need direct server access I strong recommend their sister company MOSSO as well (http://www.mosso.com/).  We recently moved over to them to get cloud hosting and with over 60 sites have never had a better experience.  I can give a few down sides to MOSSO that Rackspace "fixes" but this is simply due to the access levels you have at Rackspace over MOSSO (IE: You can't install ffMpeg on a MOSSO server).

 - Jeremy

Anthony Eden

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Jan 7, 2009, 10:24:51 AM1/7/09
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Amazon's EC2 IP ranges are essentially unusable for SMTP since they
have been blacklisted. I have to use another host to handle outbound
SMTP traffic.

As for traffic to Twitter, most likely you'd want to use an elastic IP
address to get whitelisted.

Sincerely,
Anthony Eden

--
GMU/IT d- s: a32 C++(++++)$ UL@ P--- L+(++) !E W+++$ !N o? K? w--- !O
M++ V PS+ PE Y PGP t+ !5 X- R tv b++ DI+ D++ G- e++ h---- r+++ y++++**

http://anthony.mp

gveselka

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Jan 7, 2009, 3:11:56 PM1/7/09
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If you are worried about losing your twitter capability at The Planet,
then you should consider moving over to Rackspace. I’ve been using
them for 4 years running multiple accounds/servers and always get
great support. Their account teams make the migration process simple
and always go above and beyond.

You won’t have to worry about losing your Twitter capabilities again.

Gary Veselka
VP Sales
www.ayudabiz.com

Brad Cavanagh

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Jan 9, 2009, 4:56:58 PM1/9/09
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On Jan 6, 8:52 am, "Alex Payne" <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
> I've put our operations staff in touch with someone from The Planet.
> We'll see what happens!

I realize it's only been three days, but has there been any movement
on this issue? I just discovered that my host is at The Planet and was
contemplating deploying an app sometime soon...

Alex Payne

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Jan 9, 2009, 5:03:25 PM1/9/09
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I'm not aware of any resolution.

--

R. Moose

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Jan 10, 2009, 5:00:47 AM1/10/09
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What is the current status of this?

The issue arises as lots of other 'hosting' companies (such as
HostGator) also co-locate with The Planet's datacenters.

If Twitter does blacklist a range of IP addresses, will they be
provided so that we can check to see if it is possible that any issues
caused are due to IP blacklisting?

For example, some of my clients run sites that are with a reseller of
HostGator and their servers might be within The Planet IP range, but
we don't always know.

For example, domain.com might be with host.com who is reselling
hostgator.com who has a server located in theplanet.com hosting
center... or not.



On Jan 5, 2:05 pm, "Alex Payne" <a...@twitter.com> wrote:

jstrellner

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Jan 11, 2009, 5:31:14 AM1/11/09
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Just do the following: go to your start menu, then click on run, then
type, "cmd" (without the quotes). Then type "ping domainname.com",
replacing domainname.com with the actual domain name that you want to
check. You'll see a line like this:

Pinging twitturly.com [67.88.244.11] with 32 bytes of data:

Just after the domain name is the IP address. Now, once you have an
IP address go to http://arin.net and in the top right where it says
search, enter the IP address.

In the results page, look to see if there is anything that says
"THEPLANET" or, "ThePlanet.com Internet Services". If you do, then
you are in their IP range and will be blocked.

Hope that helps. Oh, and these directions were if you are running any
of the windows variants. If you are on a Mac, use terminal to ping
the IP or if Linux, use the command line.

Alex Payne

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Jan 11, 2009, 5:16:14 PM1/11/09
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Heard back from our operations team. Apparently we've improved our
communication with The Planet, and we will not be blacklisting their
entire IP range, just select IPs when they come up on our abuse
reports.
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