I'm experiencing a weird problem. I am running a Slackware 12.1 box as a web server. Everything has worked fine (for a few years in fact) until today.

Suddenly, the box will not accept ANY inbound connections from the outside world, of any kind. Everything just times out, whether they be http requests, ssh requests, etc.

Remotely, I am able to ping the box successfully, but any attempts to access websites, or to ssh, from the outside world fail.

From within the network I am able to ssh into the server, and can access a website, which tells me that the server itself is able to actually process requests once it gets them.

The router that this server receives requests from is also used to support the other interet activities in my home, all of which work just fine. I also hopped on the router and verified that there have been no changes. The fact that I can ping the server also means it is reachable from the outside, but not on any of the ports I need to function.

On the server itself, I can find no evidence in the logs of anything going wrong. I tried disabling the firewall and tried to connect, but still no joy. netstat shows the various network services are in a LISTEN state.

Of course, I tried rebooting the server and router, but that didn't help.

I am completely baffled at this point. Does anyone have any suggestions as to next steps to take to troubleshoot this?

Thanks.

Hi,

From your description, it seems to me that the problem is on the router, the server being fine.
So can you share some details about the router you are using?
It can be many things: blocked ports, blocked TCP traffic ...

Regards,

Tshimanga

Thanks for your reply.

I considered that yesterday after my initial post here, and removed the router from the equation, connecting the server directly to the cable modem. It did not make any difference.

Ok, now I feel really stupid. My ISP changed my IP address (which had remained constant for over 3 years), so it was no wonder I couldn't reach anything! This is solved, and I am embarrassed!