Nimbus

Unlocking your IP address

A website would not let you in, and you were sent an unlock link to fix it. Open the link, sign in, press one button, and the site opens. That is all there is to it.

Some people arrive here from the other direction: an invitation email for an account on the hosting infrastructure, ending with a section about needing that account to whitelist your IP address. It is the same job, and the account in that email is the one you sign in with here.

Why the site would not let you in

The site only accepts visitors from a list of approved IP addresses. Your computer has such an address, and it is not on the list yet. That is why you saw an empty error page with no explanation: the site never even loaded.

The unlock link you were sent adds your address to the list.

You could have received multiple /unlock links

Sites are spread over several servers. Every server has its own control panel, so every server has its own unlock link. They all end in /unlock and differ only in the part before it:

https://panel.hosting-company.com/unlock   (example)
https://panel.other-company.net/unlock     (example)

The pages look the same, but they are separate systems. Each has its own sign-in and its own list of approved addresses. Unlocking on one does nothing on the other. New servers get added over time, so you may collect more links than you have today.

Use the link that came with the site you cannot open

There is no page that lists all the unlock links, and you cannot guess one from the name of the site. Save each link next to the site it belongs to, and use that one again next time.

If you have no link for the site that is blocking you, ask the person who gave you the site. This is the one thing you cannot look up yourself.

Your username and password also belong to one server only. If you use a second unlock link, you get separate sign-in details for it, even if they happen to look the same.

How to unlock your address

  1. Open the unlock link you were sent, the one ending in /unlock.
  2. Sign in. You land on the IP unlock page. If you end up on the panel's front page instead, press "Unlock my address" there.
  3. Look at "Your address". That is the address the panel sees you coming from, with a line telling you whether it is unlocked.
  4. Press "Unlock my IP address".
  5. Go back to the site and reload the page. It opens straight away. There is nothing to wait for.
The button unlocks where you are, and nowhere else

There is no box to type an address into. The panel unlocks the address you are connecting from right now. You cannot unlock a colleague, an office, or a computer you are not sitting at. Everyone else has to sign in themselves, from the place they want to work from.

You can have one address at a time

A new unlock replaces the old one. If you unlock at the office and later unlock at home, the office address stops working.

If the page says you are unlocked from a different address, that is what happened. Press the button again to move it to where you are now.

If the site still does not open

  • Check the address on the unlock page. It shows what the panel sees. If it is not what you expected, a VPN or a company network is sending your traffic through somewhere else. Either switch it off, or leave it on and unlock again, but stay with the same choice afterwards.
  • Check you used the right link. An unlock on one server does nothing for a site on another one, and the result looks exactly like a failure.
  • Check it is the same site. All these error pages look alike, and a page can load something from another site.
  • If the panel says the change was saved but is not active yet, press the button once more. If it keeps saying that, report it. That one is not something you can fix.
  • If the unlock page itself will not open, your address is blocked there too. Then you need the method below, set up in advance.

Unlocking without the browser, with an API token

Your IP address can change on its own, for example when your internet connection restarts. When that happens, the unlock page stops recognising you as well, so the page that would fix it is behind the same door. A token gets you out of that, but you have to create it while you can still sign in.

An API token is a long password for a computer to use instead of you. You create one in the panel under Your account → API tokens, and it is shown only once, so copy it somewhere safe. A computer holding that token can unlock its own address with a single command, with no browser and no signing in:

$ curl -X PUT https://panel.hosting-company.com/api/v1/allowlist/address \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $NIMBUS_TOKEN" \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -d '{"label":"Home office"}'

This unlocks the address the command comes from and nothing else, exactly like the button. You can safely run it on a timer, say every fifteen minutes, so your address is always up to date. One token per server, like everything else here. Chapter 08 explains tokens in detail.

Create a token on the day you get your account, not on the day you are locked out.