Weird network issue at work

[Radii]

Is my company changing what we have access to without telling us? When I left work on Thursday there was nothing that I could not access as far as I knew. When I came in Friday... not the same. No announced changes. I have rebooted my computer, updated all programs involved to the most recent versions, and for things like telnet, used command line to make sure its not the applications I use.


Things that work fine still:

everything on the web that I used previously, all websites, internal and external, including one chat via the web
MSN Messenger as a standalone program
telnet to internal servers
ssh to internal servers(via putty)


Things that don't work:

telnet, ssh, and ftp to any outside server. All respond with a "connection refused" message. This is not just to places I was specifically accessing Thursday, but anonymous ftp servers and places I never did telnet to from work(the hosting site for FOFC FBCB for example).

AIM, Yahoo IM and MSN Messenger through Trillian. They won't connect.


Things I haven't tested:

Standalone AIM and Standalone Yahoo IM(I don't have them installed here).




Network people: Does this make any sense at all? MSN Messneger working but trillian not working makes me think this isn't something that was done intentionally. If they were going to limit our access globally, I'd think it would be done via some sort of announcement, and it would include websites, but I've never heard of FTP and telnet failing like this before.


Does this sound like a firewall problem or IT cracking down on specific types of usage?

[JonInMiddleGA]

Does this sound like a firewall problem or IT cracking down on specific types of usage?

Sounds to me like an example of "Unintended Consequences" (i.e. somebody tweaked something & broke some shit they never even thought about).

[jeff061]

Well they could easily have just blocked all outgoing traffic for related ports at the firewall, I'm not 100% sure how you block traffic over Trillian, but allow them through the native client.

It could very easily be what Jon said.

edit: If they are using a proxy server I am pretty sure they could have configured MSN to use it through a group policy, while Trillian would have been screwed.

So maybe they added a Proxy server that is either limited or poorly configured.

[cartman]

Yep, the Trillian thing definitely points to something new added to a firewall. Trillian goes out on a special port at startup, and if it can't get through, Trillian won't connect to any of the IM engines. I run into this all the time.

It sounds like someone made a change to only allow ports 80 and 443 to get through.

[jeff061]

Trillian goes out on a special port at startup

Ah, good to know.

[Radii]

I didn't know that about trillian, interesting. I downloaded Yahoo's IM program, and it can't connect directly either.

One of our remote employees e-mailed me last week because she couldn't access one of the shared public drives that we have a ton of information on. I had forgotten about that, hopefully that's still an issue too. We often get documents from our customers via FTP, i find it hard to believe that was intentionally removed. I also hate drawing attention to myself though, espicially in the "Hey, the stuff I use to goof off at work is no longer working, fix it please" sense.