LDS Catalog is Blocked

I had an interesting problem reported today for one ward in the stake.
When the ward clerk attempts to logon to http://ldscatalog.com he enters the unit logon (user/password) and then gets a blank screen after he logs on.

This problem is occuring with both FireFox and IE8 browsers. It appears to be related to a single ward computer. Two other computers using the same Internet connection in the same building do not seem to have the problem.

No other web sites are giving any problem. I'm thinking that for some reason Sophos may be blocking the address, but I have been unable to ascertain this for sure.

I will be taking a more in-depth look on Monday afternoon but I was wondering if anyone has had this problem or may have some insights.

Could even be a cache problem on the machine too, just had to restart a PC after it could not even get into Yahoo Mail at home, but could load Google. Once I restarted, I was able to get into Yahoo Mail OK being at home.

Checked K9's rating for it, since I'm using it at home, and it shows 'Religion'. That one seldom gets it wrong, and on the rare occasion something somehow gets misrated, it is fixed, sometimes within minutes, if the request is submitted during business hours on a weekday.

Might have been some internal issue at the server level too for all we know, and you just happened to be trying to view the site from that one machine at the right time.

JamesAnderson wrote:Could even be a cache problem on the machine too...

This is the most likely cause. Delete the temporary internet files and cookies. This has solved browser problems for me in the past.

JamesAnderson wrote:Could even be a cache problem on the machine too, just had to restart a PC after it could not even get into Yahoo Mail at home, but could load Google. Once I restarted, I was able to get into Yahoo Mail OK being at home.

Checked K9's rating for it, since I'm using it at home, and it shows 'Religion'. That one seldom gets it wrong, and on the rare occasion something somehow gets misrated, it is fixed, sometimes within minutes, if the request is submitted during business hours on a weekday.

Might have been some internal issue at the server level too for all we know, and you just happened to be trying to view the site from that one machine at the right time.

The problem's been occuring for a couple of weeks and was only reported to me today. The pc's been rebooted several times and the cache flushed today when I was checking it. It's definitely not a server issue as the problem's only happening on a single PC. Cookies and the cache has already been cleared to no effect. It's also occuring on both IE8 and FF.

I'm going to be checking a few things Mon afternoon including Sophos to see if there's a block there.

techgy wrote:The pc's been rebooted several times and the cache flushed today when I was checking it.

Make sure cookies are deleted also and not just the temporary internet files.

jdlessley wrote:Make sure cookies are deleted also and not just the temporary internet files.

Already tried that. No effect.

Out of curiosity, try pinging it. See if the name resolves to the correct IP.

Since I don't have a unit LDS Catalog account, does anyone know what LDS Catalog requires? If it uses Flash and Flash has been uninstalled or corrupted, that might be it.

RussellHltn wrote:Out of curiosity, try pinging it. See if the name resolves to the correct IP.

Since I don't have a unit LDS Catalog account, does anyone know what LDS Catalog requires? If it uses Flash and Flash has been uninstalled or corrupted, that might be it.

Good idea. I'll give it a shot on Monday.

Well, in spite of previous indications that the problem wasn't the firewall it turned out to be the Cisco ASA 5505 after all. The firewall is configured with a filter that limits the length of a character string (URL).

Apparently during the process of viewing a selection on ldscatalog.com the URL was so long that it was being blocked. A call to the GSD did the trick after the tech removed the filter.

So if anyone else is having this problem, here's the solution.