I am having significant troubles accessing https web pages from home on any device. Initially it was just usps.com but it has grown to Bed Bath and Beyond and AA.com. Specifically from any device on my home network (IOS, Mac and Windows) I get a
Access Denied
You don't have permission to access "web-url" on this server.
Reference #18.25a75b68.1502569054.2c13e2cf
I know it is not the website as I hopped on one of our AWS servers and can access these same websites. I have cleared caches and cookies. I have tried IE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. I turned my modem and router off for ten minutes and I manually set the dns to Googles. Still no success.
I did a tracert and pinged one of the sites and everything looks good (more or less).
I also looked at developer mod in Firefox and see that the response is getting to the server I am getting a 403 response from the server.
I want to note that I actually have two modems and two internet services at home. I can access these resources from my business line but I need to access them from the home line - this is a convoluted way of saying this problem seems specific to my home router and or modem and or IP address. I did ask my ISP to change my IP address and they will not.
21 Answer
I did three different things, one of which is likely to have solved the problem.
Replaced the modem First, I believed that replacing my modem would cause me to be assigned a new IP address, I had been thinking about a newer one and so did purchase a new modem. While in the call with my ISP to bring the modem online I discovered that the IP address from the cable company is assigned to the router, not the modem.
Got a new IP Address I frustratingly explained to the person helping what I had done so far and indicated that I would go purchase a new router if necessary. He was more supportive and helped me with the steps to get a new IP address. What I needed to do was reset the modem - this would then give me the best opportunity for a passive assignment of a new IP address without him having to do anything.
Updated the Firmware on the Router When the router was coming back on it required a firmware update.
When the three steps were complete I had full access to the sites I was struggling with. The tech indicated that this was something they see very very rarely and he thought my best bet for future trouble shooting would be to start with the router.
I actually suspect replacing the modem had nothing to do with the resolution but am keeping it in this list as it was something that changed
I finally sorted this out. I use some automated code to visit the SEC EDGAR system and extract documents from their collection. My use is legitimate / allowed and actually encouraged by the SEC. However, Akamai monitors traffic going through the web and when I am scraping EDGAR they flag my ip address as a bad actor. They then maintain a list that they rent to a number of companies that is used to limit traffic to those company websites. My IP address goes on the list when I am scraping and those companies then pay Akamai to block my ip address from accessing their website - Among the clients of Akamai that I have had problems with AA.com; USPS.COM, MACYS.com and HarleyDavidson.com.
It seems to take about a week of no scraping to get my IP address of the list.
I should note that I confirmed this with an Akamai engineer and a network engineer with the SEC. The SEC doesn't understand why Akamai uses legitimate traffic to EDGAR to identify scrapers but they do.
