weird 403 (forbidden) website access issue

[Gary Aitken]

On 4/2/20 2:50 AM, Mike Clarke wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 April 2020 06:03:05 BST Gary Aitken wrote:
> 
>> How likely is it that the small window size (1028) in the 4th pair
>> (HTTP: GET request) is causing the server to refuse the request? If
>> so, is this a firefox issue or an underlying tcp issue?
> 
> It's not just Firefox. I've tried Firefox, Chrome, Midori and
> Konqueror and get the 403 code with them all from my FreeBSD box but
> no problem with Firefox, Chrome and Edge on Windows 10.
> 
> But I think I've found a clue to the cause. I tried Lynx with its
> default settings and it worked fine but when I changed the user agent
> header to
>
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:74.0) Gecko/ 20100101 Firefox/74.0
> I got a 403 error.
> 
> Looks like the server is only accepting requests from a restricted
> range of browser and OS combinations
> 
> Lynx/2.8.9rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1d-freebsd
> is accepted but
> Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:74.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/74.0
> appears to be regarded as 'dangerous'.

Thank you!
I will see what the hosting service has to say from there.
I got similar refusals from some sites such as lowes.com as well.

Gary