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When I'm at the office, I can browser to twitter.com and log in. No problem.

When I'm at my wife's computer at home, ditto.

When, however, my laptop is at home (behind the same NAT-ural router), twitter.com never responds. It does not matter whether I use Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

I'm puzzled as to how Twitter can even distinguish the different computers at my house, and I have been unable to identify a 'front door' at twitter to whom I can inquire. Any ideas?

More information:

/Users/benson/x/oap-jas-gcoref ping twitter.com
PING twitter.com (199.59.149.230): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 199.59.149.230: icmp_seq=0 ttl=248 time=106.766 ms
64 bytes from 199.59.149.230: icmp_seq=1 ttl=248 time=107.800 ms

traceroute: Warning: twitter.com has multiple addresses; using 199.59.148.10
traceroute to twitter.com (199.59.148.10), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1  wireless_broadband_router (192.168.1.1)  1.182 ms  0.969 ms  0.901 ms
2  l100.bstnma-vfttp-106.verizon-gni.net (173.48.139.1)  7.515 ms  7.186 ms  7.218 ms
3  g9-0-2-1706.bstnma-lcr-07.verizon-gni.net (130.81.129.230)  7.149 ms  6.877 ms     7.531 ms
4  * * *
5  ge-0-0-0-0.ny325-bb-rtr1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.23.253)  22.198 ms  14.758 ms  15.089 ms
6  0.so-0-0-0.xt1.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.1.41)  17.091 ms  19.365 ms  17.856 ms
7  0.ae3.br2.nyc4.alter.net (152.63.3.110)  14.671 ms  14.418 ms  15.333 ms
8  204.255.173.54 (204.255.173.54)  15.008 ms  72.287 ms  14.875 ms
9  vlan51.ebr1.newyork2.level3.net (4.69.138.222)  14.711 ms  14.531 ms  17.194 ms
10  ae-3-3.ebr2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.132.89)  22.859 ms  22.638 ms  21.937 ms
11  ae-82-82.csw3.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.154)  22.879 ms
ae-72-72.csw2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.150)  26.549 ms  24.565 ms
12  ae-2-70.edge2.washington4.level3.net (4.69.149.80)  28.017 ms  29.232 ms  27.924 ms
13  twitter-inc.edge2.washington4.level3.net (4.53.114.82)  29.810 ms  29.826 ms  29.646 ms
14  xe-1-3-1.pao1-cr2.twttr.com (199.16.159.87)  97.955 ms
xe-0-2-0.sjc2-cr2.twttr.com (199.16.159.44)  89.643 ms
xe-1-3-1.pao1-cr2.twttr.com (199.16.159.87)  94.227 ms
15  xe-1-0-0.smf1-er1.twttr.com (199.16.159.29)  97.417 ms
xe-11-0-0.smf1-er1.twttr.com (199.16.159.51)  91.215 ms
xe-1-0-0.smf1-er2.twttr.com (199.16.159.41)  99.407 ms
16  r-199-59-148-10.twttr.com (199.59.148.10)  97.575 ms  101.617 ms  92.797 ms

On my wife's computer:

new-host-2:~ karenmackenzie$ ping twitter.com
PING twitter.com (199.59.148.82): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 199.59.148.82: icmp_seq=0 ttl=250 time=104.334 ms
64 bytes from 199.59.148.82: icmp_seq=1 ttl=250 time=106.221 ms

The IP addresses are quite different ... but browsing to this address also just sits there, no response. Just for fun I tried:

telnet 199.59.148.82 http

on both machines. Hers gets a connection. Mine just sits there ... no connection.

This problem is completely unique to twitter. I have no problem talking to anything else. AFAIK there are no proxy settings on my laptop at all.

share|improve this question
I don't think is Twitter, I think it's a laptop setting, like a proxy or something similar. Can you ping or traceroute twitter.com from your laptop? – Alex Jan 16 '12 at 13:54
My first guess is that it has something to do with the DNS settings. You can change it to use OpenDNS or Google's DNS servers and try. – highBandWidth Jan 16 '12 at 13:59
2  
Is Twitter the only site that affected? If not this would be a better question for Super User. – ChrisF♦ Jan 16 '12 at 14:18
Only twitter. Nothing else. No proxies are configured on this machine. – bmargulies Jan 16 '12 at 14:26
@bmargulies Try tracerouting it and see if and where it stops. From command line on your machine, not using an online web service. – Alex Jan 16 '12 at 14:47
show 5 more comments

closed as too localized by phwd♦ Jan 17 '12 at 5:11

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, see the FAQ.

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

And the answer turns out to be:

Some insane policy in my Verizon router blocked some web sites (including twitter and newscenter.verizon.com). In particular, anything connected via Wifi to my timecapsule, and then by wire to the VZ router, encountered this problem. Anything wired directly to the VZ router did not.

Since the VZ support person could not be bothered to actually investigate the configuration of my router, and rather insisted that I do a hard reset, I can't tell what in particular other than cosmic rays or bad luck produced this situation.

Yoo, Hoo, diamond mods: perhaps this should migrate to superuser?

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