Why does typing IP Address into browser doesn't work?
I am trying to reach a website which AFAIK is DNS blocked in the country I am residing. The webpage I am trying to access is pinnacle.com. Given the understanding of how DNS works I have, to work around the problem, I use an online DNS lookup tool (dnsqueries.com). From an A record I found the IP address 192.230.70.134. I happily entered that into the browser, trying both :80 and :443, but got returned the following error: 192.230.70.134 - Resolving failed Error code 22 The proxy failed to resolve the site from the host name, if this site was recently added please allow a few minutes before trying again.
<...> Proxy IP 192.230.70.134 When using :443, Chrome also shows that the website's HTTPS Certificate is invalid, even though when inspecting it, it looks alright and it even says Certificate is OK.= I don't understand what sort of DNS resolution it is complaining about and why I could be facing such a problem.
HTTP and HTTPS are protocols which need the correct hostname in most cases. Typing IP address into browser doesn't work as often multiple sites are hosted on the same IP address and they can be distinguished only by the name given either in the HTTP-Host header and in case of HTTPS the SNI extension in the TLS handshake. Accessing a site by IP address omits the information about the requested hostname and thus can result in strange error messages or the wrong certificates.
In the specific case of pinnacle.com and the IP address 192.230.70.134: this IP address belongs to Incapsula which is a DDoS mitigation company. The error message you see is from their reverse proxy which forwards the traffic to the protected sites. It cannot handle the hostname 192.230.70.134 given in the HTTP requests since it expects instead the real hostname pinnacle.com. That's what the error message "failed to resolve site from host name" means - it is about finding the target host to the given name and not about DNS resolution.