my friend cannot access modx revo (2.0.7) from his house (weird issue)

so i setup a modx revo site (2.0.7 fresh install) for my friend to display his photography stuff, everything is fine, he’s able to upload photos and use the manager from work, but when he’s at his house, he cannot get the manager to load. he’s tried it on several laptops (macs) and a desktop (pc) on both wireless and hardwired. but when he’s at work, or somewhere else, no problem. i just had him try logging into the manager of my site (modx revo 2.0.0 upgraded on each update through 2.0.7) and he gets the same thing (see screenshot of my website).

any ideas? if you look at the screenshot you’ll notice it’s like the filetree just never gets loaded. it doesn’t have the "collapse arrow", so that’s not it either.

if he clicks any of the menus (like "Components"->"Gallery") items it apparently just loads a blank page.

again, this is *only* at his house, but seems to be on any computer he uses. he’s able to load some modx evo sites i’ve made for him just fine. i just have no idea how to even begin troubleshooting this, anyone had anything similar happen? worst case scenario i will just delete this site, and set him up with 1.0.5 and use maxigallery, but we just got the revo gallery setup just right.

Hi,
That is really weird! From what you’re saying, the site is apparently working fine. What stood out was that the whole problem was only in his house, so the problem is probably there. It also is with any computer there, wireless or not.

To me that sounds like something I experienced with Wordpress. I was developing a site for someone, and its admin was hideously slow. A very few other sites were also hideously slow, but nothing clearly in common. Most sites just were fine. I troubleshoot pretty thoroughly, and I was trying everything I could think of.

The answer was a complete surprise - it was my router! All I had to do was update its firmware to the most current version, and no more problem!

Obviously I can’t guarantee that it will fix it, and a firmware upgrade always comes with caveats, but who knows?

Cheers, Dave

To continue with Samba’s idea, there are now router viruses that antivirus software can’t protect you from. One good question to ask is whether your friend changed the default username and password of the router when it was installed.

My comment isn’t really going to help, but ...
I have a client who was not able to get to her website *at all* during a sliding window of time via a particular ISP from her house. I could get to it from where I work using a different ISP. The ISP’s tech people could get to it. But from her house, during a 4-6 hour window of time in the morning, it wasn’t available - even on my computer. Other sites were.

We then determined that other neighbors using the same ISP in her neighborhood would experience the same thing with this particular website. Checked with the hosting company and nothing was amiss. Her ISP repeatedly insisted it was a problem with her house (I know, doesn’t make sense that others would have the problem) until I showed them that via an IP address the site was accessible but not via a domain name - ie it was a problem in the ISP’s network.

Of course, their tech support doesn’t deal with their own internal network problems, so the problem had to get bumped up to a higher level. A call to the public utility commission accomplished that wonderfully

All that is a long way of saying I’d be looking for a router problem too.
Matt

Quote from: BobRay at Feb 02, 2011, 03:12 PM

To continue with Samba’s idea, there are now router viruses that antivirus software can’t protect you from. One good question to ask is whether your friend changed the default username and password of the router when it was installed.

Bob,
Wow, funny you should say that! I got one of those once, too! And man, was that a beyotch to detect! I started getting webpage redirects, did all my virus and malware scans (I do that all the time anyway), and absolutely nothing came up. I found an extremely obscure comment somewhere that prompted me to check the router config. I was using the default id/password (really dumb), and I figure some malware had just gone fishing for the router, and hooked me. Once I cleared the hard-coded DNS and changed to a good password, no more redirect weirdness. (sorry, went somewhat off-topic).

Another thing to check would be the hosts file. I’ve had situations where a host somehow got a wrong IP number attached to it in the hosts file and there was no way to reach that site from my computer. Deleting the line in the hosts file fixed it.