I can’t connect to some websites at all. It is probably not a browser issue because I have tried with both IE 6 and Mozilla. It is also not a connection problem, as other things are downloading just fine.
So far, the sites I can’t access are - Amazon, Ebay, PayPal, and Newegg - all large commerce sites. What do these have in common that I can’t receive data from them? On the other hand, I have no problem loading barnesandnoble.com or messageboards such as this.
I have used the command line to ping the problematic domains and it tells me “request timed out”.
I am using Windows XP with a DSL connection. If anyone has an idea of what I may do to correct this, please help.
Look for how far it gets before it starts losing packets - that will give you some idea how far you’re getting. This will be helpful info for your ISP tech support person (whom I see in your near future). Another thing to try is
ipconfig/all
and look for the IP addresses of your ISP’s DNS servers (these are the machines that resolve names like yahoo.com to IP addresses like 127.0.0.1) Try to ping those DNS servers to make sure they’re up and you can see them.
Another thing to try is find the IP address for (say) Amazon.com by some other means (e.g. www.samspade.org) then try to access it by IP - if you can get to it by IP but not by name, it’s almost certainly a DNS problem.
Ok, thanks…seems like thats the problem. I assume this affects all the (Earthlink) users that use those DNS servers to resolve domains, right? So most likely, it has been addressed and will be fixed? Or is this a matter that I should vocalize personally to a tech support rep?
Another possibility is that your hosts file has been edited with an entry for these sites.
What OS are you on ?
Go to your \Windows directory or \Windows\System32\drivers\etc dir and open the hosts file in notepad. It’s a file called “hosts” with no extension. If you find entries for the sites mentioned above, delete the lines.