from Hacker News

Hetzner Connectivity Issues Due to Sanction Busting Activities

by ksajadi on 9/18/24, 11:16 PM with 18 comments

  • by oefrha on 9/19/24, 12:12 AM

    Good. More people should have a taste of these absurd IP range blocking practices (and hopefully they get to experience more of IP range inconveniencing practices like endless CAPTCHAs as well). People who have never experienced these tend to have a very naive view of the freedom of the Internet in 2024.

  • by kelnos on 9/18/24, 11:41 PM

    I was just having a chat with some friends yesterday about sanctions in general, and how wildly ineffective they are most of the time. I believe they often have a negative effect: they hurt regular citizens while the leaders who they're meant to target suffer little, and instead of achieving their intended goals, they turn citizens in the target country -- even those who are not happy with their government -- against the countries imposing the sanctions.

    I do expect that sanctions make inroads toward their stated goals. Sure, less money means less weapons, probably, and the choice of suppliers becomes more limited, meaning costs are higher, and quality might suffer.

    But Iranian sanctions have been in place for decades, with little to no changes in their government that the West would consider favorable. Cuban sanctions didn't do much "good". Russian sanctions haven't ended their war in Ukraine.

    Sure, sanctions can serve to contain adversaries to some degree, and slow things down, but they don't seem to really do much positive. And their negative effect on goodwill and relations really sours longer-term diplomatic efforts. I do tend to feel like they have a net negative effect, most of the time.

  • by BLKNSLVR on 9/19/24, 12:52 AM

    This feels like it could be related to the Iran IP address thing.

    HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41585249

    Original article: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/production/-/issues/8...

  • by newaccount74 on 9/19/24, 1:42 PM

    I had a similar issue with Hetzner. I host my downloads on a Hetzner cloud machine, and one of my customers reported that they couldn't download updates. Turns out their company used some enterprise security product named "Zscaler" that mis-identified the IP of my Hetzner VM as Iranian and blocked it.

    My customer contacted Zscaler, and after a few days they unblocked it.

  • by CodesInChaos on 9/19/24, 8:50 AM

    Do sanctions really require blocking all access from Iranian IPs to sites hosted by a US provider? Don't they usually just require not doing business with people from sanctioned countries?

  • by homarp on 9/19/24, 5:05 AM

  • by surfingdino on 9/19/24, 12:45 AM

    In the light of latest events in Lebanon you don't want to be hosting Iranian content anyway, just in case your servers explode.