I lost connection to discworld.starturtle.net more than an hour ago
(as of 2020-02-04T03:37:00Z), and still can't connect directly, though
it is available from a few servers. Judging by traceroute,
ae-3.cor1.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk is to blame, so I went to check the
status on that ISP's website, zen.co.uk, which said that "this site is
not available from your location"; neither it wanted to serve Tor exit
nodes. So I have only checked that traceroute does not go beyond
ae-3.cor1.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk (if it is on the path) from
lg.telia.net, which required to allow google.com and gstatic.com
JavaScript to function. But unlike, say, lg.he.net (which also tries
to load scripts from Facebook, Google Analytics, and Twitter), at
least it managed to run traceroute in the end.
The worst part is that it is not surprising, and it is a similar
experience each time: debugging tools are awful and/or broken, NOC
email addresses are hard to find, things just break and possibly come
back sometime later at random. I wonder how people who work with it,
well, do work with it. Maybe there's some secret club where they have
(and hide) working tools.
