Anyone know...

[delboy]

... how the internet works?

Since the 25th I have been experiencing strange web problems - essentially there are a whole swathes of sites than I can no longer access from this machine. I've not changed anything on my PC. It started on Christmas Day, I assumed it was just because there was a lot of web traffic, but it's still not righted itself. The same problem afflicts a second PC, so it's not machine specific. The router is okay because the majority of web sites are accessible - just these dozen or do (there may be hundreds of others, of course) that I can't get. The sites themselves are not the problem because I can access them from my work machine via a different ADSL line. So it's not the sites, not the machine, not the local area...

Any ideas? I've raised a query with the helpdesk but to no avail so far. Also, according to the BT forum, there a re a number of other people with exactly the same issue, spread across the UK.

 

Derek

[Geoff_N]

I use BT Broadband but maybe I use far fewer site than you cos I've not experienced any probs. Could you give a few examples of sites you can't access now but could before?

It all reminds me a bit of that scene in the IT Crowd when Jen took a box into a board meetiing and told them it was 'the internet' and they all believed her.

Geoff

[Caz]

A virus springs to mind as my machine has been playing up for a month or so and I wonder if it's been infected. It's not the same as your problem but still annoying and it just happened a moment ago. The machine gets stuck on whatever page I'm looking at. It's not frozen on that page but refuses to go anywhere else. I can't logout, can't go back to the home page, all I am is trapped. The only way out is to close FireFox, disconnect from the internet and shut the PC down and then fire the whole thing back up again. Then it all works fine until the next time it decides to screw around. I've got an up to date virus checker and firewall so it's a bit of a mystery as to what's going on.

Not much help with your problem I guess but it could be a variation on the same thing.     

[LashSlash]

try cleaning yor registry---there are cleaners you can download

[Ed]

I've come across this before. A few reasons for this happing spring to mind. The first is somebody who shares your IP address has been banned from the sites you're visiting, or from a shared hosting server the site is hosted upon at server level. The second is that the sites are hosted on the same patch as your phone -- I don't really understand how this works, but I vaguely remember something way back in the dim and distant about chat protocols not being able to connect back to the same area. Some kind of loopback problem.

I've also had this problem happen while trying to connect to this site when it was hosted in Texas. That was local area network problems around where the servers were based. I could get through using a proxy, but not without. Seems like there are 'roads' from UK straight to where you want to go that are blocked, so you have to work around and come in on a B road sometimes.

Del -- go to your start menu, select the 'run' icon. Type cmd in the box and press enter. A dos screen will pop up. In the dos screen, type tracert, followed by the name of the site you can't reach (I'll use problemsite.com) like this --

tracert www.problemsite.com

Then hit the enter key. This will track through the number of hops between where you are and the hosting server where the site actually is. You may find one of the hops isn't letting you through, or is taking too long. Once you've found it, you may be able to contact BT with this specific information and get them to fix the network for you.

There are a few other tests you can do to see if you're banned for whatever reason, but I'm betting it's a network issue.

[eagle37]

A virus springs to mind as my machine has been playing up for a month or so... The only way out is to close FireFox,

The latest version of Firefox is a buggy as hell. I'm running 3.6.16 on three different machine (all Windows 7) and it keeps crashing or locking up.

The inabilityto access certain sites only from specific locations suggests a thing called 'cache poisoning', and relates to black magic known as DNS to your ISP. DNS translates between URL and IP address, and there will be one or two DNS servers you specifically use in a given geo location. UNfortunately, if you mention any of this to the helpdesk they will just hear "wibblewibblewibble" and ignore you. Eventually someone farther up the support chain will realise they are getting lots of reports of the same thing and purge the cache.

Well, that's what happens in my team, anyway 

If the problem location is on ADSL, it might be worth swithcing the router off for 24 hours, which would force a reload of any config data from the network. Unfortunately, it will also change your IP address (which might be a problem for some people)

Good luck trying to ski through this particular revolving door