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Whenever I do tracert from my Windows XP PC I always get "request timed out" for this particular destination server. But others are working fine. Only our server which is located in Dubai that is not tracing properly always all the time.

I am able to access the site (via IP notation) sometimes but more often I am not able to access it. Why is this?

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Dubai is one of many countries that has active internet filtering so you may be seeing a side effect of that even if there is no specific reason for the Dubai authorities to block the traffic to\from your target system. I've no idea how their internet controls work but it is quite likely that the decision making part of the stack adds significant latency to traffic that is uncommon (which yours will be) while it checks whether it has been banned or not. If the system is under load it's probable that traffic will get dropped even if it is not explicitly banned, otherwise DOS attacks on the filtering stack could be used to bypass them. High traffic sites are likely to have their approval states cached and the latency introduced by the filtering stack will be less noticeable (unless the target address\port\protocol is banned of course).

There are many other possible technical reasons so take this as a possibility, not a definitive answer.

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  • i may have now a problem with this because come time that we will forward the domain to this ip address issues with that filtering will still be effective... I bet there is no remedy to this situation? some users will see the site others will won't? this is a real issue isn't it?
    – jan
    Jan 17, 2010 at 12:28
  • Dubai (well the whole UAE really) do actively filter some stuff so this is a real issue in some sense, how much that actually affects your traffic is speculation on my part. The best approach to take is contact Etisalat as they control this to the best of my knowledge and if your service is not likely to be part of a blacklist then it might be possible for them to ensure that it's more reliable.
    – Helvick
    Jan 17, 2010 at 13:54

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