I have a slightly weird problem that I can't really understand.
A lot of people host their Tomcat services, such as Geoserver, on port 8080, but when I try to access these from my browser in my current location, I just get a timeout error as if there were no response from the server (network monitor in Chrome shows that DNS resolution happened but no response from server).
Having found this, I emailed the administrator of a service I am trying to access to report that his server was down and he said that the service is working fine and can be accessed normally.
I tried using a VPN to access the service from my office computer in the UK (as I'm out of the country right now) and the connection succeeded.
I know nothing about networking protocols, so is there an explanation for a specific port being unavailable not because inbound traffic is blocked at the server end, but because the router or ISP at my end will not receive traffic from that port?