How to fix my internet wierdness?

[Shifty Geezer]

As of today, IE and FireFox are both having trouble opening webpages. I get frequent 'page cannot be displayed' errors, both from links and typed in URLs, but it seems erratic. Sometimes I can go to Google in my Favourites and it works. Sometimes it won't work. If I type in keywords into the address bar, sometimes I get the search results, and sometimes just the error. And sometimes I can type in a web address and it will work, whereas other times I can't. I also get embedded pictures not being loaded from time to time. I also have Outlook Express failing to find the mail server from time to time.

My best guess is a DNS problem, but I've no idea what could cause it to go wrong or how to fix it. The only thing to change of late is my ISP (to Tiscali), but that was a couple of days ago and everything's been fine until today. Could this be an issue with them?

Any ideas?

 

[Geo]

Yeah, I'd certainly be taking a hard look at the ISP. In fact, I'd call their tech support and make them do some diagnostics.

What are your pings looking like to these sites you're having trouble with? Preferably the bigger/more reliable site the better (like, say, cnn.com).

 

[nelg]

Same thing here with IE7. Also my brother in-law has been having the same problem. Perhaps there is some type of backbone updating going on?

 

[alt_nick]

I agree with checking pings. I had the same problem and it turned out to be a bad router that gave me 50% packetloss.

If you still suspect it is DNS-related, try looking up hostnames with nslookup to see if the ns-server fails to respond - still shouldn't be as erratic as Windows has a DNS cache.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yeah, I'd certainly be taking a hard look at the ISP. In fact, I'd call their tech support and make them do some diagnostics.

I think the ISP is looking likely. I've found that just repeatedly refreshing a page that hasn't loaded, eventually it does. I'm guessing their servers are somehow busted, or just getting hammered. That'd explain all the connection problems from different programs.

 

[karlotta]

you have rebooted your modem? On/Off, and the same for your router.

 

[epicstruggle]

you have rebooted your modem? On/Off, and the same for your router.

Good suggestion, id also look at running a spyware/virus check.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Everything's working fine now. Definitely an ISP service problem. Phew!

 

[Graham]

I've found our old ISP would perform some kind of connection limiting. Not sure exactly how, but one day something similar happened when my flatmate was torrenting (*mumble*) at around 20k/s up and 60k/s down. Not huge, but he was uploading to ~15 people and downloading off about as many. I was having a very similar issue, even pinging google.co.nz was getting a ~75% failure rate (but good pings when it worked).

Killing the torrent fixed the troubles.

Although it could well have been a local network/router issue though... We wern't using the most reliable/expensive kit..