Washington DC Gateway Unreachable

Hi All -

Since the launch of 2.0, I began experiencing strange disconnects to login screen when entering some zones and hideouts. Been playing since closed beta, and have never experienced anything like this. I've spent some amount of time troubleshooting this on my own, and have determined that it's because the WDC Gateway is unreachable for me.

Here's a forum post I have been building up in Bug Reports Forum detailing the issue as I explored it to understand what was going on, but I will also recap here:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1339282


::ENVIRONMENT::
Windows 7 x64, high speed cable internet, stable connection that shows no packet loss or ping inconsistencies at this time. I normally play via the standalone poe client. My ISP is Time Warner, I live in Texas and normally connect to the Texas gateway with about a 20ms ping.


::PROBLEM DESCRIPTION::
Completely unable to connect to WDC Gateway. On login screen, after pings appear for each gateway, WDC is left with a ? beside it. When I attempt to login to it, login fails with "Unable to connect to server" message.

More troubling, I am unable to join hideouts or zones that have a player in them who is connected via WDC gateway. When I attempt to do so, I am immediately disconnected to login screen. As you can imagine, this is causing real problems with things like trading, master mission sharing, and shared mapping.


::THINGS I'VE TRIED::
These are all troubleshooting steps I've taken, but nothing has alleviated the issue so far.
- Disable Firewall/AV
- Complete reinstall of PoE Standalone client, including removing files leftover in both shared and programs directories after uninstall.
- Fresh install of Steam client, doesn't worth through that either.
- Use a VPN service with various exit points both inside and outside the US. The fact that this does not work seems to indicate this isn't an issue with my ISP routing me to WDC gateway, but something else.
- Switching between lockstep and predictive modes.
- I found a forum post from when Chris announced the new gateways that pointed me here, which is apparently a list of the new PoE gateway servers: http://www.softlayer.com/data-centers ; I am indeed able to ping and trace to speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com, but since the ping on login screen isn't working, it seems this is either incorrect information, or there is actually a different host in this WDC datacenter that my client is attempting to connect to which is causing the problem.
- Various other troubleshooting steps, but some not necessarily relevant as per my current understanding of the issue. All have been detailed in the bug reports post linked above


::QUESTIONS::
- Can someone give me either the hostname or the IP of the WDC gateway so I can attempt a traceroute and see where things are going wrong?
- What am I missing here, anybody have any idea why this could be happening?

Thanks, and Best Regards

I found the excellent network troubleshooting guide here:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1377789

And have run a few tests using WinMTR v0.92 64-bit...

Testing on wdc.login.pathofexile.com, simply no response from host:
http://pastebin.com/w6vNUGdN


For comparison, here is a test on my normal gateway, us.login.pathofexile.com:
http://pastebin.com/A0QaMzHS


A final test, using my VPN service to originate from NYC instead of Austin, testing on wdc.login.pathofexile.com, yields the same results for my original wdc test:
http://pastebin.com/aixnymJv

And testing us.login from NYC VPN:
http://pastebin.com/S5cyVtBr


So, is this an issue with my ISP not routing me to the WDC gateway properly? If so, how come the VPN does not resolve this?

FWIW, I do use OpenDNS as my primary DNS servers(208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220), and googleDNS as a tertiary (8.8.8.8). Not sure if OpenDNS is playing a role here but would be interested to find out if anyone knows if this could be the culprit.

Any assistance you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Welp, I finally figured this out and pretty much feel like an idiot now, but I wanted to share my findings in case anyone else is experiencing similar issues.

The problem was due to a local firewall program I run called PeerBlock. I swear I had tested this numerous times with PeerBlock disabled, but circling back to it today I was able to make some configuration changes to the program and was finally able to not only see the WDC Gateway ping on login screen, but actually connect to it via logging in.

By default, under PeerBlock's Anti-P2P block list, a large swath of IPs are blocked under the label "IBM" in the range of 158.84.0.0 - 158.88.255.255.

For me, wdc.login.pathofexile.com resolved to 158.85.40.111, which lies within this range. I allowed this IP, and was then able to see the WDC Gateway Ping on login screen. Then when attempting login, PoE tried connecting to another host in the WDC datacenter, 158.85.40.109. After allowing this IP as well, I was at long last able to connect to WDC Gateway.

So moral of the story - if you're having connection issues similar to the one I described, triple check that your firewall gets disabled as part of your troubleshooting, or you're gonna have a bad time. Good luck everyone!


Final Question on this topic: is anyone able to provide the full range of IPs from the WDC data center which PoE may attempt to connect to? I now know what to look for if I experience sudden disconnects in the future, but it would be nice to open these up beforehand to preempt this possibility. Thanks!

The IP range for poe servers in WDC datacenter appears to be the whole 158.85.40 subnet. After allowing this range, haven't had a problem with PeerBlock disconnecting me from WDC datacenter