Just replaced my home wifi router. It’s a Netgear unit. Does what it’s supposed to for the most part. Bizarrely, there are two websites that can’t be accessed (carbonite backup service and Fidelity investments) for no earthly reason. Maybe it’s sunspots.
Tech support at Netgear says it must be my computer. But neither one of my PC’s or my I-pads will work for those sites either.
Not expecting any solution, just rambling on a cold New England morning.
Could it be this?
A false positive in the router’s malware protection would blacklist the affected websites. (Or, maybe it’s not a false positive and they’re actually malware-compromised, but that seem less likely.)
Not running Netgear armor. Can’t find anything in their basic user manual explains what’s going on.
What error message is displayed when trying to open those websites? Does it come from the router, the browser or the websites? I know it’s improbable, but maybe they have been both offline for a couple of days. May also be a DNS problem on the router’s or your computer’s side.
Have you already restarted the router?
I’ve rebooted router several times. There is no message presented from anywhere. Browser just sits there when I try Fidelity. Carbonite runs quietly in the background and normally copies files for offsite backup as they are updated, so long as you’re connected to internet. They keep advising we aren’t connected and I can’t force a connection manually.
Does it work if you bypass the router and connect directly to the modem?
I’d also recommend power cycling all your devices. Once they are powered down, wait 5 minutes then power them back up in this order:
What DNS server(s) are you using?
If you don’t know how to find this, reply and I can try to walk you through it.
I have rebooted everything multiple times. I can connect my PC if I use my phone as a hotspot. If I plug in ethernet directly I get message “ethernet does not have valid IP configuration”.
Need to step away for an hour or so. Appreciate your input.
No idea what DNS is. Stepping out for an hour or so. Thanks.
I’m back!
One thing you might try is pinging* the site(s) in question to see if you can even reach them through your router:
If all is well, you will see four responses indicating the internet address and how long it took. If there’s a DNS issue or some other problem that prevents the url from resolving to an internet address, you’ll see “Ping request could not find host {url}.” If the site can be found but isn’t responding, you’ll see four timeouts.
This will not resolve your problem, but should give some indication where the failure is occurring.
* My understanding is that the term derives from sonar “pinging” to search for a submarine. Your computer will send what amounts to an “are you there?” request to the target and wait for a response.
Every website is referenced with a series of numbers, called an IP address, like 142.250.217.110. Since it’s easier to remember google.com instead of those numbers, the Domain Name System (DNS) maps the more friendly URL to that IP address. There are a number of DNS servers on the internet who maintain these mappings, and you can configure which ones you want to use. (There’s a little more to it than this, but this is fine for a high level explanation.)
If there’s some weirdness going on with your DNS server, it can result in some sites loading fine and other ones not. Changing what server you are using, or clearing out any saved addresses in your system (“flushing the cache”), can sometimes fix this.
To see your DNS settings, open the Command prompt as described by OttoDaFe above and type ipconfig /all. Among a bunch of info, you’ll see something like
DNS Servers . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
192.168.1.1
If it starts with 192, 172, or 10, it means your router is defining the servers to use, and you’ll need to look at the router configuration. If you know how to do this, post the addresses here. If not, I’d hope that this would have been one of the first things that Netgear support looked at.
And as long as you have that Command prompt open, you might as well type ipconfig /flushdns. It probably won’t help if you’ve already rebooted everything, but it won’t hurt anything either.
Spent around 2 hours on the phone with Netgear support. Final conclusion - router is NFG. Netgear sending replacement.
The home computer works fine when ethernet is plugged directly into Spectrum modem. It works fine with Iphone as hotspot.
When using wi-fi it will not allow carbonite backup. Also found that if I run a speed test, the download process always works, but upload will not work on wi-fi.
The bizarre part is that normal web browsing works just fine. Literally the only issue is if our PC is trying to shove something upstream.
Thanks to all who offered advice and opinions.
find a service to ping these two websites, then ping them with your own computer, if the returned IP addresses are not same, then there might be some setting/firewall changing the the visiting rules. Try to login 192.168.0.1 to check your router.