502 Bad Gateway

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I see that a user in October 2020 reported a 502 Bad Gateway, but his problem was resolved, and I don’t know if the problem my team is having yesterday and today is the same or different problem.

All computers and phones in our home are unable to get to pressbooks dot com and we get 502 Bad Gateway response, but if we use cellular connection on our phones, we can get to the site.

We had the same problem several weeks ago right after I added a new user to our team, which I assume is coincidence rather than causal. It resolved on its own back then after a couple of days.

This time has a new wrinkle. I added my sister as a new user. She lives 600 miles away, so she has to be on a different Internet pathway than we are. Immediately after adding her as a new user, she couldn’t get to pressbooks dot com through her home wireless but could get there if she used her phone with WiFi turned off.

I tried to use fiddler to dig into what happens when we try to get to pressbooks.com, but it shows no intermediate problems, just the 502. When I look up 502 on MDN, it points the finger at the pressbooks site.

If anyone on this forum knows anything about my problem, I would be most appreciative.

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After four days we can all get into pressbooks dot com. The one thing that I did just before the site reopened for us was to install a VPN, which allowed me to get into pressbooks dot com and make a small update to my book. After I turned the VPN off, everything started working again. I think there is a bug with the pressbooks.com backend when you add a new user to a book and gets cleared when any change is made to the book.

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Hi @JonFerraiolo I think what you may have run into was an IP ban that can be triggered by too many unsuccessful logins within a certain period of time. We have rules set up to protect pressbooks.com from malicious bot traffic, and occasionally human users get caught up and temporarily banned from accessing the site. While banned they see the 502 error you described. The ban usually wears off in 24-48 hours. We’re working on displaying a more human-friendly error message for those rare cases where humans with books on the network get unexpectedly blocked from accessing the site.

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