Sign In authorization not working on one PC

[placey]

My FIL has two PCs in his home. One can sign in to Church sites and the other cannot. All other sites load and work fine on the second PC (Windows 10 Pro). Both are connected to the same WiFi router. I have tried both Edge and Chrome browsers, have cleared all cookies and cache, and tried both InPrivate and Incognito windows in both browsers with no luck.

The main churchofjesuschrist.org site opens but when I click Sign In the id.churchofjesuschrist.org/oauth2/default/v1/…. page tries to load but nothing ever loads. The same behavior also exists when starting from other church sites or sites like familysearch.org that use church sign in.

I’m afraid that somehow the IP of this PC has been blocked in some way. I haven’t yet downloaded a VPN (and don’t want to have to rely on that even if it works). But has anyone seen this behavior before?

[placey]

Update: Connecting a VPN works around the problem and allows the sign in page to load.

However, I don’t want to have to rely on this and makes me wonder why the church’s server is not allowing the non-VPN’d connection.

[placey]

Update 2: switching to using a wired connection over the Ethernet port also allows the sign in page to load. So there is something with the specific MAC address or something of the WiFi adapter being used that is being blocked or causing some other problem.

[russellhltn]

Sounds like an issue with his home router. Some kind of restriction might have been added for that MAC address. Keep in mind, the computer will have a different MAC address for wired and wireless.

[placey]

I dug through all of the home router settings, and there’s nothing set up specifically for that MAC address. So I think there is something on the church’s server side that has set a policy for that MAC address that is somehow blocking access. Is there anyone available that can look into that side of things and troubleshoot this?

[russellhltn]

I think it highly unlikely they could be doing that would allow a wired connection to work and wifi to not work. Unless you're running IPv6, it's going to be coming from same IP address via your router.

[mdigi]

There was another big attack on CloudFlare earlier; I wouldn't be surprised if the church uses CF in their CDN design. It may have simply been: if your computer didn't already have an authorization cookie before the attack, you were out of luck for logging in to get one until things settled down. VPN likely offered different routes that either were not impacted (or had already been healed sufficiently after the attack)

Try again tomorrow and see if you get different results.

[ambldsorg]

So I think there is something on the church’s server side that has set a policy for that MAC address that is somehow blocking access.

I find this extremely unlikely if not nigh unto impossible. MAC addresses are only used in Ethernet Frames on a local medium and are not routed, they aren't even part of TCP/IP. The only way the Church might have an inkling about what MAC address you're using is if you are using IPv6 and using a EUI-64 generated IPv6 address which is based off of the MAC.

Now, it is possible that the Church has your IP address blocked, however, again, I find this highly unlikely because most people do not use publicly routable IP addresses assigned to internal PCs (unless they're using IPv6), which means that both PCs are very likely sharing the same public IP address via NAT and a block of that IP would block all PCs on the same network.

What is interesting is the claim that using the VPN gets around it. Is the VPN also a proxy that might be hiding headers or otherwise cleaning up the HTTP interaction between the PC and the Church?

Is there anyone available that can look into that side of things and troubleshoot this?

You would need to contact GSD and get a dialog going with them to see if they can help diagnose the problem.

The most likely cause of the problem is with your WiFI "router"; while it might not be blocking the MAC, it could certainly have some kind of DNS block or other "parental control" filter that is blocking access for some reason. Look through the settings for blocked websites.

[ambldsorg]

The main churchofjesuschrist.org site opens but when I click Sign In the id.churchofjesuschrist.org/oauth2/default/v1/…. page tries to load but nothing ever loads.

Have you looked at the browser tools to see if there are any page loading errors or network errors?

[placey]

So, I went back to look into this further yesterday, and when I switched back to a Wi-Fi connection, everything was working properly. So, there must've been something in the router that was hanging things up, but is now resolved after a day's worth of use over ethernet cable connection. I had previously logged into the router's admin console, and looked for any routing rules, or anything else that could've contributed to this and didn't see anything at the time. But it's a fairly basic router with not a lot of controls in it. So, I don't know what the ultimate problem was, but it seems to have worked itself out. Thanks everyone for your input.