I sat with an interesting problem the other day. Essentially all of a sudden I couldn’t access this site (craiglotter.co.za) from my home connection, which of course meant that I immediately hopped on to Afrihost’s support page to log an issue (they currently host this site for me). They quickly responded saying that the site was loading just fine for them, and indeed, when accessing the site through an anonymous proxy like Anonymouse.org, I too could see that the site was up and running. So the next problem had to be my home Internet connection itself, and after running a couple of tracert requests to craiglotter.co.za, I could see that for some or other reason, one of the servers in the chain hop was simply refusing to respond to my machine’s requests.
Based on the support guy from Afrihost’s screenshot, I could see that the US-based address that was denying my traffic was allowing through his, so next on my steps to resolve was mucking about with different DNS services. Needless to say, this didn’t solve the issue either.
I rebooted the router once or twice, but that didn’t solve anything either, and then I twigged that perhaps I’m being rejected based on IP address – which in that case could be resolved by forcing a change of my Telkom line’s external IP address.
Grabbing my current external IP address via http://www.whatismyip.com/, I switched off my router for 25 minutes. No such luck. Neither did a sleep of 30 minutes do it either. Too late to call up Telkom support to request a line port reset, I located a note on the Internet that in order to manually reset your Telkom IP address in the manner least likely to raise flags (like cloning or changing your MAC address for example), you need to turn off your router for an extended time period – around 8 hours is a safe bet.
So I duly turned off the router (or rather, instructed Chantelle to turn it off before she came to bed in the evening), and the next morning as I settled in to start work, I flicked it on and checked my external IP address – success! To force a reset of your Telkom IP address, just turn off your modem for a super long period of time (+- 8 hours)!
Of course, if you are trying to do this during the day, you could just phone up Telkom and ask them to do a port reset which might solve the issue, or if you can access your router, switch the WAN connection to say the Telkom Guest Account and then back again, as this should also force an IP reassign according to Afrihost support guy (I received this last tip after having solved the issue, but it is worth mentioning here).
Anyway, problem solved!
Related Link: http://www.whatismyip.com/