Hi,

I just downloaded Civil Netizen a week ago and tried several times to get it to work. All attempts failed even though I forwarded the ports on my router, shut down the local firewall etc. The service status page has the message "Yellow: Intermittent and annoying" since I started looking at it. Is it just me or is this service not working at all at the moment? Before I invest any more time in this it would be nice to know if this is working for other people.

Thanks, Pim

Hi Pim,

Yes the service is still working for many of our users. A small percentage of our users are experiencing some connectivity difficulties from certain ISPs (Rogers Cable, Verizon FiOS, various French ISPs, etc). We're working on this problem and will have it fixed for the next release. Many users who have connectivity problems run into DNS related problems so please ensure that your router/firewall doesn't do any DNS based filtering/forwarding. A number of routers incorrectly filter standards compliant DNS messages from Netizen.

I hope this helps.

Paolo

Hi Paolo.

Thanks for the response. Since my ISP (Verizon FiOS) is in the list of problematic ISP's I will stop trying for now. Thanks for that bit of information. On the one hand I can't wait for the new version that should solve these problems but as a developer I understand the need for testing and QA. Take your time with the new version.

I am interested to know how certain providers are causing problems. Is it the routers/modems they are providing or the actual filtering/blocking that the providers are doing?

Thanks, Pim

PS. If you need someone to test with Verizon FiOS let me know.

Hi Pim,

Some ISPs are filtering packets at their routers, causing either slowdown or no service to our network. Other providers such as Verizon FiOS are not forwarding some of our DNS requests, causing Netizen to stall. I've reworked how our network works for the next release so hopefully it will be able to work around some the issues users have been experiencing with their ISPs. A good number of users are experiencing trouble because their routers are aggressively using SPI filtering or have broken DNS forwarding and request filtering.

I hope this answers your question. I'll let you know if we need some Verizon FiOS testing ahead of the next beta release.

Paolo