Hello everyone,
I am an OpenDNS user and I was hoping to get a little advice on confirming who is blocking hardrock.com

Here's the situation.

I currently live in Rome Italy and I am a telecom Italia (Alice ADSL) user. My wireless router behind the telecom italia router is configured to use OpenDNS and it works great. The problem is that I discovered today that I am unable to access www.hardrock.com.

I am using an iMac running 10.5, with a VM running Vista, and I have an iBook running 10.4 so in total I have tested with 5 browsers and I still can't access that site. I checked it with dowforeveryoneorjustme.com and it comes back as up, my wife across town using a different provider gets through no problem, and if I use Ninjaproxy I can get through to it and browse it also without any trouble.

So the question is how do I confirm who is blocking that site? Is there a way for me, from within whatever is blocking the site, to confirm where the block is? Am I being an idiot and it's really something much more basic and I'll regret ever posting this question? I ran across a blog post today while researching this, about some trouble that OpenDNS was having with Telecom Italia, and while I don't actually believe thats the problem because I can't get through whether using OpenDNS or the providers DNS, I thought some one here might have some insight into how weird Telecom Italia is.

Any help with any of these questions would be appreciated.

Yeah I guess I did miss the important part.

I don't actually get any error message at all. In IE the status at the bottom just says "Waiting for hardrock.com" and never starts to download anything. Safari just keeps trying to load and never gets anywhere. I don't get any 404 or anything like that. Just browsers that keep trying to load and get stuck.

@hurt.bill
I would like to second infinity306, and in addition "Waiting for ..." indicates that it is NOT a DNS problem, because then the message would be something like "Looking up...". If it would be blocked by OpenDNS, then the block.opendns.com page appeared.

Also, traceroute and/or ping may not help at all, as too many servers nowadays do not respond to ICMP echo packets to prevent from DoS attacks. Hardrock.com seems to be one of them:
http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=hardrock.com
http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=trace&host=hardrock.com

Edit: Do a "nslookup hardrock.com.". Does it come back with 206.100.93.99 quickly?

Sure, but....

TraceRoute to 206.100.93.99 [hardrock.com]

Hop (ms) (ms) (ms) IP Address Host name
1 19 15 10 72.249.134.177 -
2 6 8 29 8.9.232.73 xe-5-3-0.edge3.dallas1.level3.net
3 13 17 15 4.68.19.134 ae-34-89.car4.dallas1.level3.net
4 7 11 17 208.173.178.141 er1-te-3-2.dallasequinix.savvis.net
5 6 9 6 204.70.204.146 dpr1-ge-2-0-0.dallasequinix.savvis.net
6 7 13 14 204.70.196.29 cr2-tengige0-7-5-0.dallas.savvis.net
7 36 37 30 204.70.192.69 cr2-pos-0-0-0-0.atlanta.savvis.net
8 27 29 28 208.172.65.245 acr2-so-4-0-0.atlanta.savvis.net
9 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
10 Timed out 41 45 216.91.95.26 -
11 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
12 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
13 Timed out Timed out Timed out -
14 Timed out Timed out Timed out -

Trace aborted.

A poor result in case of hardrock.com, isn't it?

My traceroute gets to savvis.net in Atlanta too and times out. Just means they are blocking it.

hardrock.com using opendns loads super quick for me. I am having problems with extremely low TTL coming back from OpenDNS causing me some issues. 7 second TTLs for example. Causing pages not to load and showing me the OpenDNS something else is wrong page.

I was gone for a few days but I thought I would post an update on this.

First I never really suspected that it was OpenDNS actively blocking Hard Rock or inadvertently causing the problem. As some have pointed out, being blocked by OpenDNS should have resulted in a blocked by OpenDNS error page.

Neither pings nor tracert's resulted in anything at the time. I forget how far the tracert got before failing but others have confirmed that Hard Rocks own host seems to be blocking those, and pings simply resulted in all packets lost.

infinity306, I agree with you that it seems to have been a network and routing issue with my ISP and a temporary one at that since as of yesterday I have had no trouble getting to hardrock.com.

I posted my question to this forum, again not because I thought OpenDNS was the problem, or because any one here would have any particular insight into the workings of an Italian ISP, but just so that I could pick the brains of others more experienced with internet structure in general than I to see if any one was willing to share an insight, and thank you to all who responded to my problem for providing exactly that.

I don't have any idea what sort of networking error would cause me to be unable to reach that single domain on the internet from my ISP, but I suspect that there is simply a lot more about this problem that I don't know, and that I can no longer test since I can now reach that site.

"I am shocked that opendns is NOT blocking hardrock.com"
OpenDNS doesn't block anything anyway, not at all. The only exceptions are phishing sites and Conficker domains, and even this blocking can be disabled.
This is YOU, deciding what you want OpenDNS to block for your network (only), while selecting certain categories or blocking individual domains.

"...what they have on the lists for voting..."
Submitting and tagging domains is almost with the user community, not with OpenDNS. Also St.Bernard play a certain role with certain "adult" categories.
http://www.opendns.com/community/domaintagging/faq/
http://forums.opendns.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=3515

Well I am using Telecom Italia and their Alice ADSL service, and I have been using DynDNS.com to find my computer over the internet for some months now and I always seem to have the same public IP address. Assuming that we are both allowed to use NAT as a verb, if I were getting NAT'ed wouldn't my DynDNS setup fail since my ISP would have no reason to set up port forwarding rules to get outside traffic to my computer?

Sure I guess I do owe an answer to that one.

I just did the command and it returns the correct address almost instantly. I didn't do that test while I was having trouble accessing that site but since I can see that I am getting the address from OpenDNS' servers I can only guess that it would have worked then as well.

Edit:
Just to clarify, I did the command from a terminal window on my computer and not some web based service, so I know I am testing my own setup and not how well some one else's web site works.

BTW NAT is a verb:

"network address translation (NAT) is the process of modifying network address information in datagram packet headers while in transit across a traffic routing device for the purpose of remapping a given address space into another."

Translation = verb

Sources:
- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Verb
- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Network_address_translation