Tatiana's tomato base

[Tania]

Dear All,

All links to TOMATObase (new and old) should work for home computers, if you have not change any default firewall settings. If the link does not work for you, it likely means that your firewall blocks http traffic on port 88.

If this is the case, please use a proxy server, i.e., http://helpmesurf.net/, or any other proxy server that Dice linked to in his post above. Just go to the proxy web page and type tatianastomatobase.com in the text box there.

Our order system should also work. Let me know if it does not work for you.

Thanks,
Tatiana

[freelancer79d]

it seems to be blocked from my work and i can not use a proxy sever from a NAVY computer

[dice]

Usually if your firewall simply unblocks tcp port 88, connects
to tatianastomabase.com will work the same as they always
did for http connects to tcp port 80. The firewall usually does
not care what application level protocol you are connecting
with (http for the World Wide Web, ssh for encrypted logins
and file transfer, smtp, pop-3, or imap connections to email
servers, and so on). The firewall only cares what the destination
port number is, whether the protocol underlying the application
level protocol is tcp or udp (or rtp or whatever), and whether
or not the destination ip address is specifically banned for some
reason.

Some firewalls are more sophisticated, inspecting packet
headers and watching for things like a switch from tcp port 80
at a nominal destination address to some other port number
at a real destination, and denying such sessions as inherently
suspicious.

edit:
For anyone that thinks this "protocol" stuff is "all Greek",
the document (.pdf) below provides an overview, so that
even if one does not know any of the details, communication
and signalling protocols are no longer a complete mystery:
http://www.spinroot.com/spin/Doc/Book91_PDF/F1.pdf

[dice]

A little more on internet protocols and "port numbers":

So what are these "port numbers"? They basically work
like post office box numbers.

You can think of a network server as a kind of post office.
It starts up server processes that "listen" for connections.
Often there will be more than one listener. It may have
a WWW server, an email (smtp) server, a Domain Name System
(dns) server, a Secure Shell (ssh) login server, a Kerberos
server (different kind of secure login system), a File
Transfer Protocol (ftp) server, a Network Time Protocol (ntp)
server, and so on. When it receives a request from a remote
client at another machine, like a web browser, how does it know
which listening process the remote user's client wants to
connect to?

That is what port numbers are for. When the WWW server
process starts up, it typically tells the network server's operating
system that it wants to listen on tcp ports 80 and/or 8080. When
the email server starts, it tells the operating system that it wants
to listen on tcp port 25. The DNS server listens on udp and/or tcp
port 53. And so on for the other listening processes. Well-known
and registered services have officially assigned port numbers
from IANA ( http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers ),
but the listening processes can ask the operating system to
listen on any port that they specify (if two different server
processes running on the same network server want to listen
for connections to the same port at the same time, that does
not work).

You see this all of the time with online streaming audio. You
connect to a WWW server serving streaming audio on tcp port
80 or 8080, and the server redirects your web browser to
connect to some other arbitrary port number to receive
the audio packet stream. It is using port numbers to seperate
different audio streams that it is serving to different remote
network clients at the same time (there are other ways
to do this, seperating different client sessions internally that
are all connecting to port 80, but forcing them to connect
to different ports for different audio streams seems to be
common practice).

The remote client processes, the web browsers, email clients,
etc, have their own port numbers, too, but those are usually
assigned dynamically by the client's operating system when
the client process requests a connection to a remote server.
The client's operating system just picks a port number for that
particular session at random from the high port number range,
recycling those port numbers as short-lived client sessions end.

[OneoftheEarls]

I can't link using Firefox...it times out...problem is only at work and we have fast servers...I can get on using Google Chrome and a WIFI at home

[dice]

I can't link using Firefox...it times out...problem is only at work and we have fast servers...I can get on using Google Chrome and a WIFI at home.

Your firewall at work is probably filtering out connects to tcp
port 88 at any remote ip address. Yet when your web browser
at work tries to connect to "tatianastomatobase.com" on tcp
port 80 (standard WWW port), her ISP's dns server is redirecting
that to "t.tatianastomatobase.com:88", which tells your web
browser to resolve "t.tatianastomatobase.com" to a numerical
ip address (via another dns query), then connect to tcp port 88
at that ip address, where the web server that hosts
TOMATObase is listening.

The network administrator thinking at your work is likely "we do
not use Kerberos for authenticated login sessions or single
sign-on cluster access or anything like that, so why do we need
to let requests to connect to tcp port 88 (the standard
Kerberos port number) at some remote ip address through
our firewall? We are not authorized to allow that."

Whereas they have been instructed to let out traffic
to destination tcp ports 80 and 8080, so that their
users can connect to remote WWW servers (educational
resources, etc).

I bet lots of online music streams from vtuner or shoutcast
do not get through at work, either, not to mention file
sharing "torrents" like BitTorrent.

Your home firewall (the wifi router probably has a firewall, plus
you probably have one in the network configuration of whatever
operating system is installed on your home machine), on the
other hand, has no such rule on what tcp port at a remote host
your web browser can connect to, so the redirect to tcp port 88
poses no problem for your web browser.

It would not matter whether the web browser was Firefox,
Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari, or any other WWW browser. The
blocked connect is happening in between the client (your web
browser at work) and the remote server (the WWW server that
hosts TOMATObase), at a firewall designed to filter out
connections to unauthorized remote ports (services listening
on some tcp and/or udp ports at remote servers are insecure
over the internet, some are just big computing resource
wasters, some are used by spammers who want to recruit
client machines as unwitting mail forwarders, and so on ad
infinitum).

[OneoftheEarls]

so in two words..."I'm screwed" ?

[simmran1]

I had no trouble about 10-12 days ago and placed an order/received seeds all good. I mainly use Google Chrome, but today I cannot access Tatianas Tomatobase with any browser. I have made no changes on my end, so possibly this is an expanding problem (?)
-Randy

[kath]

I've also had trouble both yesterday and today, but on and off- sometimes ok, sometimes not.

[OneoftheEarls]

now I get this at home

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

[Idahowoman]

I get the same message.

[paulgrow]

I too have been having trouble.

[casino]

Same here I am having trouble connecting. Internet Explorer gives me an error message, HTTP 403 Forbidden.

When doing a Google tomato name search I can get all the seed vendors but no reference to Tatianas Tomatobase

[fortyonenorth]

Works fine here. I'm on a Mac - not sure if that makes a difference.

[Tropicalgrower]

I'm in the same boat..access forbidden.I believe it must be an error on their server,and will no doubt be a temporary inconvenience.No problem accessing her site yesterday.