I did a search, and didn’t see anything that addressed this specific problem and I briefly perused the sticky notes and didn’t see anything there.
So.
As of yesterday, there are certain websites that will not load. When I try to access them, the taskbar thing says “looking for site” and then I get “server not found” or what I would see if I was not connected to the internet at all.
The odd thing is that I can access 99% of sites without a problem. Among the ones I can’t get to are http://www.telegraph.co.uk and http://www.mpr.org/. Earlier I was unable to get to NPR, but now it works fine. It sometimes takes a few tries to get google to run, or it will work perfectly until I try to get to the second page of results and I get the same error page and end up having to type the address in again and start over.
Okay, I just tried to get to MPR via Google’s cache, and it worked but no pics loaded on the main page. When I clicked a link the pics showed up.
Oh, and I can’t run msconfig–I get the message “cannot find the file “msconfig” or one of its components…”
I use Firefox exclusively. I didn’t do anything strange within the last few days that would have caused any problems. Everything else is fine. Um…Windows 2000 if that matters.
Next time you get one, drop to a dos prompt (run - CMD) and ping the site using the full URL
. What you’re looking for is to see if it resolved the DNS name to an IP address. For me that URL resolves to 203.206.129.17 at the moment.
If it does not the problem is in your DNS (name resolution). What you do next depends on where that comes from; is this a home setup via an ISP? A corporate or other organisational LAN?
If it’s an ISP then ring them and check what your DNS servers’ IP addresses should be, it’s possible they’ve changed it and you are going somewhere odd to try and resolve names. If it’s an organisation then call their help desk.
Also, next time it happens try it with IE at the same time. If that’s OK and FF is not, it’s almost certainly a local cache issue, you need to clear that out in the FF config. Edit - preferences - advanced - network - cache - clear now.
When I tried to ping MPR’s site, it timed out 4 times. I tried the Telegraph site and it said “unknown host”. When I pinged Google, it worked just fine.
I am connected to the internet via this…box that plugs into the wall. So, I don’t deal directly with an ISP. I would call my apartment manager to see if he is having issues, but I would rather not deal with him right now. It is just a minor annoyance at the moment.
Oh, and I have the same problem with IE. I cleared the cache from both, and still no good.
So, when I first got on this morning, not only was I not able to get to the original pages I complained about, but I couldn’t get to sites I had no problem with before. Like, here, and google, and a few others. I went through my favorites list until I found a site I could get to, and after I went there I was able to come here and get to google, etc.
The hell?
Folks: even if you aren’t 100% positive about an answer, I am more than happy to entertain educated guesses. I would say that probably everybody who has looked at this thread is more knowledgeable than I am about computers. Pretty please?
Try power cycling your router (unplug it, wait a minute or so, plug it back in). While you’re at it, you might as well reset your modem too.
Give that a shot. It solved similar problems for me a few times.
Sounds similar to an issue I had on my personal laptop - I could access www.google.com just fine, but gmail.google.com would result in a “server not found” error. I think it had something to do with whatever garbage firewall software came preinstalled on my laptop when I bought it. Try disabling any third party firewall programs that might be running.
It may have been something else, though, so if I remember I’ll post again.