OK. Apparently, my only link to the Internet right now is this message board. (Oh, and it seems my SO can SSH into her school.)
What is going on here?
I have three computers in the house. One gets the direct Ethernet connection from the router, which is connected to a Comcast cable modem. Two others are wireless. My laptop can get the Straight Dope webpage via the wireless. My desktop can get it, too. My SO’s laptop cannot get the Straight Dope, but she can evidently SSH somewhere.
I can’t get to Google, to Yahoo, to CNN, to anything. Wait–I seem to be able to get to one of my recent history items (a professional photo sharing site called Pictage) and I’m able to click through to current links there, but all the surrounding history items are timing out on me. Even when I access the Dope, I’ll see in the browser’s status bar that it hangs on certain sites. For example, right now it says “Looking up: www.google-analytics.com”.
If I ping any of the failing websites, I don’t get any response. I can ping the boards, and I can ping 4.2.2.2 (I don’t know what that is, but I remember some tech types using it to check the connection.)
comcast is having some issues. apparently their DNS servers aren’t responding or something, I’m having the same problem in SE michigan. I set my DNS servers to something other than Comcast, for the time being (8.8.8.8 for google public DNS should work.)
and don’t bother calling them, they’re being bombarded with calls and you can’t even get through.
Yeah, I was wondering if it was some sort of DNS weirdness. Figured there must be some sort of caching going on which is why certain web pages worked on certain computers (even though it wasn’t pulling up cached pages, but live ones.)
In general, if you can access some remote websites but not most of them, it’s DNS. (That, or a major cable’s been cut somewhere and parts of the Internet really are disconnected from the rest. But there are major companies around the world spending a lot of money to make sure that never happens.)