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Comment by caucasianalbino | Hacker News Reader

This is bullshit. I've been ping'ing the address for a while now with zero updates to their counter.

If you refresh the stats page, you can see the TCP stats updating just fine but the ICMP does not. Guessing ICMP is just getting filtered at some point.

ICMP is handled by the NATing firewall in front. Port 80 is NATed to port 82 on the 286. No CDN, no proxy, no bullshit. :)

I'll add NAT for ICMP echo requests though. Maybe with rate limiting, we'll see how it goes.

What counter? Pinging?

The counter on their site that says ICMP received. On the main website.

http://floppy.museum/status.htm

Does not reflect ICMP updates after refresh.

The site's IP is announced by https://www.blix.com/. It's conceivable that an IBM 5170 is sitting on its side in a colo rack, with a transceiver bridging its Ethernet card directly to the ISP's network connection.

But it seems more likely traffic is being forwarded or even rewritten at Layer 4. I don't think running something like HAProxy in non-caching mode would invalidate the website's claims. Even an IP forwarding solution (eg a GRE tunnel) might have http://shouldiblockicmp.com/ issues.

If http://floppy.museum/files/httpd.bat is up-to-date then the DOS HTTPD is listening on port 82, so there's a middlebox doing something.

There's a much larger than zero possibility something (network gear) North of this thing is black-holing ICMP echo and/or your ISP is dropping the responses.

You know… that title on top is clickable.

what title on top. The address for stats is:

http://floppy.museum/status.htm

am I missing something here, a counter is a counter. Unless the site is cached with a CDN which is... a CDN in front of an sx286 PC.

Could do the same thing with a VIC20, or an AM crystal radio for that matter.

The other counters on the page are updating after each refresh. I think only the ICMP counter is broken. The IP address points to a Norway provider. I do not think there is a CDN, elsewise the counters would be frozen.

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