Direct IP Addresses For Purism Site and Forum

In wake of the recent outage, I’d like to share Purism’s direct IP addresses for the site and forum so that people can still connect using that in case of a domain issue or DNS blocking.

Purism: 138.201.176.93

Purism Forums: 138.201.228.33

Simply entering the address into your browser’s URL / Omnibox should take you to the site.

And of course, take note of the domains www.librem.com and the new domain PurismSPC.com

Neither are currently active, but librem.com was active during the outage.

As for PurismSPC, quote:

Due to how domain registration works, we can’t completely remove the possibility that our domain could be suspended again in the future. What we can do is try to mitigate the effects with redundancy. To those ends we have registered PurismSPC.com with a different registrar and soon we will bring up a duplicate website and infrastructure under that domain. The idea here is to not just have a second domain with a redundant registrar, but have a domain under a completely different and traditional TLD for redundancy. We will also update our TLS certificates to list both puri.sm and purismspc.com, so you can be assured that we consider both sites valid when you visit with a web browser.

Thus, I’d personally try to first direct-connect using IP in the case of a domain failure, and if that also didn’t work, I’d start trying to connect to PurismSPC.com instead.

Once PurismSPC.com is up I’m going to take note of it’s direct IP as well.

In the instance that all domains stop working and no direct IPs work either, and you stop hearing from Purism over social media either - that’s when you can start worrying that something awful has happened.

Be sure to keep a watchful eye on the Warrant Canaries.

Just thought I’d let you all know this.

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Actually this doesn’t work. (I tried it during the outage.) The server will redirect your browser to the domain name and it will immediately fail, just as if you had typed the domain name in directly.

You have to make the domain resolve to that IP address in the context of your local machine, for example by adding the address and domain to your hosts file. (Remember to take it out again when you’re done, in case it changes later!)

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Why doesn’t Purism get an .onion address? Even New York Times has one.

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Really? I used to do this to access TPB while I was in China and didn’t have any issues.

Alright, so basically you can just add the following rules to your own hosts file so that your computer doesn’t have to look it up?

138.201.176.93 puri.sm
138.201.228.33 forums.puri.sm

Kinda strange for it to be that way. I mean in that case, why can you connect to your local gateway (EG: 192.168.1.1) without needing to make a hosts rule?

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It depends how the server is set up. I think the reason it doesn’t work in this case is the enforced HTTPS. If you just type in the IP address, your browser is going to try to use HTTP and the server is going to say “Nah. I don’t do HTTP. Please go to https://puri.sm.” and then your browser is going to try to resolve puri.sm in the DNS and fail.

In fact, if you type in https://138.201.176.93 then it doesn’t bother redirecting you (since you’re already using HTTPS), but you get a certificate error because the certificate is for the domain, not the IP address, so in the end you still have to use your hosts file.

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