How to work around a ‘Request timed out’ response

500-errorpingtimeout

  • I am in India
  • On ocassion I navigate to the portal of companies I'm affiliated to; these in the US, & Canada
  • As of today afternoon, I'm unable to navigate to the portal of some companies … albeit the website is deployed and can be navigated to from people at third-party locations (outside US, and outside India).
  • Just for reference I executed a ping -t on one company site, and at the same time attempted to open the site in Chrome
    ** Chrome came up with a 500 error
    ** Ping returned a 'Request timed out'
    ** A colleague at third location reported he was able to both ping, and navigate to the site
    ** My subsequent tracert was got as far as border8.po2-bbnet2.bsn.pnap.net [63.251.128.77], and then returned a 'Request timed out'
  • I tried the same experiment on cbc.ca
    ** Result
    ** Chrome navigated to cbc.ca successfully
    ** Ping returned a 'Request timed out'
    ** Tracert got as far as rx0sh-cbc-radio-canada.mt.bigpipeinc.com [66.244.255.78], and then returned a 'Request timed out'.

I'm flummmoxed.

  • What could be the possible reasons that a browser can navigate to a site, when PING and TRACERT fail?
  • When my colleague is able to navigate to a site over the internet, why should the site return a 500 to me?
  • What can I do to work around this problem? My call to helpdesk went unanswered.
  • Have you ever encountered a similar problem?

Best Answer

Keep in mind that PING & Tracert do not use the same protocols that http does:

ICMP vs TCP

So, I could ping a webserver, and a firewall sitting in the middle of the connection disallows ICMP, but allows TCP Port 80 (Default http).

-Josh