We're working on a project internally that will greatly reduce the number of false positives on blacklisting. Right now it's really tough to match up IPs and applications, and therefore difficult to figure out who we would contact about blacklisting. Once our internal project is complete we should have a pretty easy way to match IPs with apps, which should in turn allow us to be better about warning/notification when we do blacklist IPs.
The troubleshooting steps you listed here are good ones in the meantime. ---Mark http://twitter.com/mccv On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 6:22 PM, Tim Haines <tmhai...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey guys, > Wanted to share a few details about last nights experience in case anyone > else gets hit with it. Hopefully it can save you a few hours > troubleshooting if it happens to you. > Favstar's IP address was blacklisted by twitter yesterday. When this > occurs, they don't inform you of it. > Instead, you start seeing percentage of your requests blocked. Not all of > them, just some of them. For me it varied between the 50% and 80% range. > In the way I do my logging, these appeared as timeouts, so at first I > thought the API was suffering overload, and when @mccv told me there was no > overload, I fell in to trap of trying to diagnose either what was wrong with > my server, or what was wrong with the network in between. > What I should have done, is ran a curl in verbose mode (-v). This tells you > that your connections are being refused: > ~/current: curl -i -u > my_account:fuuu! http://api.twitter.com/1/account/rate_limit_status.json -v > * About to connect() to api.twitter.com port 80 (#0) > * Trying 128.242.240.157... Connection refused > * Trying 168.143.161.29... Connection refused > * Trying 168.143.162.45... Connection refused > * Trying 128.121.146.109... connected <snip correct/incorrect response> > When I tried this from another server, my connections were never refused. > When I tried this from the blacklisted server, I would see something like > the above. Sometimes I'd get a successful response, sometimes I'd get > "curl: (52) Empty reply from server" which googling for is useless, and > sometimes I'd get "curl: (7) couldn't connect to host". > If you'd like to see Twitter make a reasonable attempt to notify 3rd parties > when they are blacklisted, please vote on this > issue: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=1658 > Cheers, > Tim. >
