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    Unable to reach facebook.com and linkedin.com

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Firewalling
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    • N Offline
      November @November
      last edited by

      Safari is also unable to reach those sites. This got me to realize why Tor may be able to.

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      • N Offline
        November @November
        last edited by

        This post is deleted!
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        • N Offline
          November @November
          last edited by

          linkedin.com and meetup.com are now reachable after I changed my router's DNS to 8.8.8.8 and back (although this latter part may be due to DNS caching).
          facebook.com isn't reachable even when my router's DNS is set to 8.8.8.8.

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          • johnpozJ Offline
            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
            last edited by johnpoz

            @November said in Unable to reach facebook.com and linkedin.com:

            Also, nslookup for both domains comes back fine.

            Then you not getting there has nothing to do with dns, so why are you changing it? Do you think the IP returned is bad or something?

            Here is a simple test.. Try and go to facebook.com while sniffing on your pfsense wan.. Do you see it send a syn? What do you get back - anything? If you send and don't get anything back its not pfsense problem. If you don't send, then you have something on pfsense or your network that is causing the problem.

            facebook.png

            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
            SG-4860 25.07 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07

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            • N Offline
              November @November
              last edited by

              Changing the order of the firewall rules (such that the whitelist rule is applied before the DNSBLIP rule) fixed the facebook.com issue.

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              • N Offline
                November @johnpoz
                last edited by

                @johnpoz , like I said, there's lots to be gained in my understanding. In the past, when a site wasn't reachable, whitelisting the site sometimes allowed it to be reachable.

                Some of the confusion also stemmed from assuming the linkedin.com and meetup.com issues were related to the facebook.com issue (since they were both noticed around the same time).

                Anyway, changing the precedence of the firewall rules fixed the issue for me.

                Thanks for pointing me to the packet capture tool. That'll come in handy in the future.

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                • N Offline
                  November @johnpoz
                  last edited by

                  @johnpoz said in Unable to reach facebook.com and linkedin.com:

                  Do you see it send a syn? What do you get back - anything? If you send and don't get anything back its not pfsense problem. If you don't send, then you have something on pfsense or your network that is causing the problem.

                  I did the packet sniffing and am not seeing the IPs I'm expecting for linkedin.com or meetup.com. What else can be done to track down this issue?

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                  • johnpozJ Offline
                    johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                    last edited by johnpoz

                    And what IPs are you seeing?

                    C:\>dig meetup.com +short
                    151.101.66.110
                    151.101.194.110
                    151.101.2.110
                    151.101.130.110
                    
                    C:\>dig linkedin.com +short
                    108.174.10.10
                    

                    What is happening in the browser - are you getting a host not found? Can you ping them by name.. etc.. Love to help you but with no info there is nothing to help with.

                    Keep in mind those sites are going to be served by large CDNs - so yeah IPs could be different where your at in the world, time you query, etc. etc..

                    NetRange:       108.174.0.0 - 108.174.15.255
                    CIDR:           108.174.0.0/20
                    NetName:        LINKEDIN
                    

                    meetup is hosted via fastly.. which is a huge CDN..

                    NetRange:       151.101.0.0 - 151.101.255.255
                    CIDR:           151.101.0.0/16
                    Organization:   Fastly (SKYCA-3)
                    

                    Also keep in mind exactly were you going.. for example www.linkedin.com is going to be different than just linkedin.com

                    C:\>dig www.linkedin.com +short
                    www-linkedin-com.l-0005.l-msedge.net.
                    l-0005.l-msedge.net.
                    13.107.42.14
                    

                    An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                    If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                    Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                    SG-4860 25.07 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07

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                    • N Offline
                      November @johnpoz
                      last edited by

                      @johnpoz

                      $ dig meetup.com
                      
                      ; <<>> DiG 9.11.3-1ubuntu1.12-Ubuntu <<>> meetup.com
                      ;; global options: +cmd
                      ;; Got answer:
                      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 51481
                      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
                      
                      ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
                      ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 65494
                      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
                      ;meetup.com.			IN	A
                      
                      ;; ANSWER SECTION:
                      meetup.com.		46	IN	A	151.101.130.110
                      meetup.com.		46	IN	A	151.101.2.110
                      meetup.com.		46	IN	A	151.101.194.110
                      meetup.com.		46	IN	A	151.101.66.110
                      
                      ;; Query time: 0 msec
                      ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.53#53(127.0.0.53)
                      ;; WHEN: Sat Aug 08 21:30:00 PDT 2020
                      ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 103
                      

                      From Chrome:
                      meetup.com unreachable.png

                      $ ping meetup.com
                      PING meetup.com (151.101.130.110) 56(84) bytes of data.
                      64 bytes from 151.101.130.110 (151.101.130.110): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=11.2 ms
                      64 bytes from 151.101.130.110 (151.101.130.110): icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=12.2 ms
                      

                      FWIW, meetup.com forwards to www.meetup.com in the browser.

                      dig www.meetup.com
                      
                      ; <<>> DiG 9.11.3-1ubuntu1.12-Ubuntu <<>> www.meetup.com
                      ;; global options: +cmd
                      ;; Got answer:
                      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 2404
                      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
                      
                      ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
                      ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 65494
                      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
                      ;www.meetup.com.			IN	A
                      
                      ;; Query time: 6 msec
                      ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.53#53(127.0.0.53)
                      ;; WHEN: Sat Aug 08 21:40:28 PDT 2020
                      ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 43
                      

                      I'd like to focus on investigating what's going on with meetup.com for now. Hopefully I can learn enough to be able to troubleshoot what's going on with linkedin.com.

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                      • N Offline
                        November @November
                        last edited by

                        I'm not seeing any of the linkedin.com IP addresses in the packet capture even though currently it's loading in the browser for me so there's something I'm not understanding.

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                        • N Offline
                          November @November
                          last edited by

                          Oh, also, one reason I'm thinking this is DNS related is because when I switch my router to use 8.8.8.8 as its DNS server, I'm able to reach both linkedin.com and meetup.com. But my understanding could be missing something that would allow this symptom but the problem is still not with DNS itself.

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                          • johnpozJ Offline
                            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                            last edited by johnpoz

                            @November said in Unable to reach facebook.com and linkedin.com:

                            ;; QUESTION SECTION:
                            ;www.meetup.com. IN A

                            ;; Query time: 6 msec
                            ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.53#53(127.0.0.53)

                            Well your never going to get to www.meetup.com if it doesn't resolve.. you didn't get an answer..

                            As to why you didn't see anything in your sniff to linked in.. You didn't show how you did your sniff so not sure what your doing wrong.. Are you forcing traffic out a vpn? Did you sniff on the wrong interface? Did you sniff only tcp only and its using quic (udp) etc.

                            On pfsense do a dig +trace for www.meetup.com

                            Which has a cname that points to
                            www.meetup.com. 30 IN CNAME f4.shared.global.fastly.net.

                            So then do trace to that.. They have horriblely low TTLs - so those IPs most likely going to change all the time..

                            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                            SG-4860 25.07 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07

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                            • N Offline
                              November @johnpoz
                              last edited by

                              @johnpoz

                              The following is what I've been using to capture packets:
                              Interface: WAN
                              Promiscuous: unset
                              Address Family: Any
                              Protocol: Any
                              Host Address:
                              Port:
                              Packet Length: 0
                              Count: 100
                              Level of Detail: Normal
                              Reverse DNS Lookup: unset

                              The low TTLs for meetup.com explains why they become unreachable after switching my router's DNS server back while linkedin.com continues to resolve for a while.

                              I'll do the dig and trace when I get a chance.

                              Thanks so much for the help and guidance.

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                              • johnpozJ Offline
                                johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                                last edited by johnpoz

                                With such a capture you would be capturing everything but only 100 packets, so you would prob miss your traffic.. Since I would assume lots of traffic is going in and out of your wan. Even just pings would fill that up quickly since you monitor 2 pings every second, etc.

                                On your sniff set the host to the IP it resolves too so you only see traffic to and from that IP.

                                An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                                If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                                Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                                SG-4860 25.07 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07

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