hla's Journal: Dutch ISP KPN hiding customer's homepages

Friends of ours have found that their homepages at "kpnplanet", one of the ISP labels used by KPN, have become invisible for an as yet unknown part of the internet. As an experiment try the following search in Google:

site:home.kpnplanet.nl

Now check any of the links on the first results page.
(Note from the construction of the urls how this is a spammer goldmine)

I was not able to see *any* of these. They all get diverted to the 404 page of "hetnet", another of KPN's isp labels. This appears to have started around mid to late april 2008.

However, some people *do* get to see kpnplanet home pages, so it appears that KPN is routing web requests differently for different customers and internal (helpdesk?) users.

Customers who complain about their invisible home pages get told to refresh their cache, restart their browser, and various other advise relating to their own setup.

"kpnplanet.nl" is an odd one, as it appears to be distinct from the older "planet.nl", and used for KPN's VoIP customers. As VoIP requires some kind of Internet access, they get a bundle with some basic services, including mail and homepages. A possible scenario is that these customers were recently migrated to KPN's shared infrastructure, while at the same time getting their webpages disabled.

If they made such a mistake, and actually lost the original settings, there'd be nothing they could do but tell people to login and change their personal settings. The worst they could do would be to collectively enable all homepages, for obvious reasons...