[Gnuplot-info] Website not available at gnuplot.info

[Aleksandr D. <ale...@pr...>]

Hello gnuplot community,

There's indeed a problem with website availability at gnuplot.info, however it might not be strictly DNS problem, but rather some Cloudflare misconfiguration.

The domain name resolves normally and points to some IP:

> dig +short gnuplot.info.
204.68.111.101

and in case of IPv6 specific AAAA records lookup:

> dig +short AAAA gnuplot.info.
2606:4700:4400::ac40:96912606:4700:4400::6812:256f

However when I try to reach it via HTTP request I get the following response:

> curl --verbose http://gnuplot.info
* Host gnuplot.info:80 was resolved.
* IPv6: 2606:4700:4400::6812:256f, 2606:4700:4400::ac40:9691
* IPv4: 204.68.111.101
* Trying [2606:4700:4400::6812:256f]:80...
* Connected to gnuplot.info (2606:4700:4400::6812:256f) port 80
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: gnuplot.info
> User-Agent: curl/8.7.1
> Accept: */*
>
* Request completely sent off
< HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict
< Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2024 18:46:41 GMT
< Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
< Content-Length: 16
< Connection: close
< X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
< Referrer-Policy: same-origin
< Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
< Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
< Server: cloudflare
< CF-RAY: 8d19410bcc6d1af9-AMS
<
* Closing connectionerror code: 1001

Seems like the request goes to one of the servers that are configured behind AAAA records, the response comes from Cloudflare and contains the error code 1001. Quick googling brought me to this documentation page with "Resolution" section - https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/cloudflare-errors/troubleshooting-cloudflare-1xxx-errors/#error-1001-dns-resolution-error.

I suspect there's some misconfiguration in case you use Cloudflare as your load balancer/DNS zone hosting. There's indeed a workaround - you can access the same gnuplot website by just accessing the site by www.gnuplot.info domain (which, by the way, doesn't have any AAAA records).

I see from the mailing list archives that I'm not the only person facing, so I'd like to ask people who support the website to take a closer look at this issue.

I think it's an important issue, because one of the links that points to the domain with 'www.' part is the one that is on the documentation page (http://www.gnuplot.info/documentation.html) and it leads to the gnuplot online documentation (http://gnuplot.info/docs_5.5/gnuplot5.html). It means that newcomers (like myself) won't be able to access the documentation and consequently would not enjoy gnuplot's features.

You could potentially fix the issue by altering DNS zone file to not include AAAA records or to put there actual IPv6 address of the server that serves the site.
Thanks in advance!

--
Best regards,
Aleksandr Dinu