Precondition Failed

by Kerim

Help! I’m suffering from a plague of web sites I am unable to access. I’ve listed all the offending sites here. Some of them are major sites – like WordPress.org. Whenever I go to them I get the following message:

Precondition Failed

The precondition on the request for the URL / evaluated to false.

I have no idea how to get around this. Other people seem to be able to access these pages fine. And it isn’t just my computer – all the computers in my house are affected. Is there anything I can do to solve this problem? From everything I’ve figured out so far it seems to be something wrong on the server end of these sites – but I seem to be affected more than other people. Perhaps it is related to TimeWarner Cable? Any cyber geeks out there able to explain what’s happening?

UPDATE: I’ve found a temporary workaround. I can access the sites listed above by using a free proxy server.

UPDATE: Someone helped me find the common denominator: All the sites I am having problems with are hosted by TextDrive.com. Now I just need to figure out why their servers are giving me such grief.

(Time Warner Cable’s tech support was useless. They told me I must have a virus on my computer…)

UPDATE: TextDrive quickly contacted me to let me know that my IP was banned for some activity in February. Since I have a DynamicIP from Time Warner, it is likely that I was punished for something that another user did! Still, they were nice and quickly unblocked me. At least the mystery is solved!