Re: gnuplot.info unreachable (DNS failure)

[Ethan A M. <me...@uw...>]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2025 at 11:35 AM Juhász Péter <pet...@gm...>
wrote:

> On Wed, 2025-09-10 at 10: 51 -0700, Ethan A Merritt wrote: To the limited
> extent that I understand the error messages that I am seeing, it is not a
> matter of appropriate content on the server. The query is never getting to
> the server because
> ZjQcmQRYFpfptBannerStart
> On Wed, 2025-09-10 at 10:51 -0700, Ethan A Merritt wrote:
>
> To the limited extent that I understand the error messages that I am
> seeing,
> it is not a matter of appropriate content on the server.  The query is
> never
> getting to the server because some intermediate service provider is
> failing to
> deliver it.  If I am misunderstanding and there is some configuration
> thing I
> can change on the SourceForge end, please let me know.
>
>
> Hi,
>
> you've mentioned that the actual content is hosted on/by SourceForge.
>
> Under what kind of formal or informal arrangement or contract does this
> happen? Was any payment involved
>

No payment or formal contract with SourceForge that I know of.

The error message means that the certificate required to serve the site
> over HTTPS is not valid for the domain name gnuplot.info (nor
> www.gnuplot.info
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.gnuplot.info__;!!K-Hz7m0Vt54!hZAtTCSEA3UZsTRDYd1Rlg-J8_Oq7DJZg-cJMaMoMBMcyZx3lwvCVqHE401p-ZikRUWZruc71FaDNhZkYYE3tw4$>).
> If you look at the certificate (offered by Firefox next to the error
> message), you can see that it was issued by Let's Encrypt to
> secureprojects.sourceforge.net, and it is valid for a large selection of
> other domain names, presumably all projects hosted by SF.
>

Thank you for your insights.

I think you are addressing a different issue - whether the connection
protocol is https or http. It is not surprising that a certificate issued
to SourceForge would not mention gnuplot.info by name because that name is
not connected to SourceForge except in that (as I understand it) it
currently redirects queries to the actual gnuplot site
gnuplot.sourceforge.net.  The current problem seems to be that the
redirection itself fails in some cases, or fails to pass through sufficient
information (or credentials or something - I really really don't understand
this stuff).  If you are seeing an error message that refers to a
SourceForge certificate then I think in your case the redirection must have
succeeded. You still see the site, correct?  It's just that connection is
falling back to http rather that https.

I was getting an error from some intermediary network entity (Cloudflare)
that reports  "DNS resolution error 1001". As Hans-Bernhard noted, that's
rather odd because DNS does seem to work correctly when tested by command
line tools.

For completeness I should mention that the issue of connection via IPv6 as
opposed to IPv4 was raised earlier, and might be relevant, but that goes
way beyond my level of understanding.

   Ethan


> So the person who is responsible for renewing this certificate at SF
> either made a mistake by not including gnuplot.info (and in this case a
> gentle reminder may fix the issue in October at the very latest, possibly
> earlier), or deliberately removed gnuplot.info from the list of domains,
> because the afore-hypothesized contract has expired (in which case the
> gentle reminder may have to include money).
>
> As to whom that gentle reminder should be sent, I have no idea.
>
best regards,
>
> Peter Juhasz
>