AOL problem - I'm confused!

Hi,

I set a friend up with a router on AOL (his choice, not mine!) about a year
ago, and everything has worked fine. He recently bought a new PC with
windows XP, and asked me to take a look because "Internet Explorer won't
work".

So, I took a look and am now confused! It's as if AOL don't provide a
connection to the whole internet somehow, but only to certain parts of it...

For example, in IE if I visit the url: http://www.bbc.co.uk a lovely
homepage appears in the blink of an eye.
If I try http://www.ebay.co.uk then the request times out. (I tried quite a
few web addresses and couldn't see any obvious pattern as to what works and
what doesn't.)

I get pings from www.bbc.co.uk, but not from www.ebay.co.uk - DNS resolves
correctly though, so this doesn't seem to be the problem. (XP gets DNS
server details via DHCP from the router.)

I did a tracert on www.ebay.co.uk and after about 7 hops things seem to
bounce around some address with 'sprintlink.net' or something like that with
hop times >100ms before vanishing altogether. I think something must be
seriously weird with the way AOL route traffic.

Doubled checked in Firefox, and the same problem occurs.

I've checked the windows hosts file for rogue entries, used adaware and
spybot, and removed and re-installed XP's TCP/IP stuff. Same problem
remains.

In desperation, I tried a Win98 laptop (which works fine on my own LAN) and
the same symptoms persist. So the new PC with XP is probably not the issue
at all.

Can anyone offer any ideas as to why a connection with AOL would suddenly
start to be 'selective' like this? I have power cycled the router, and
double-checked the settings in it but that hasn't helped. All the usual AOL
'oddities' had already been catered for (things like MTU=1400) and the
connection has worked for 12 months or so previously.

Cheers,
Dan.

P.S. Almost forgot to mention that in AOL's own bloatware, I can browse
www.ebay.co.uk (and all the other 'missing' sites) fine. Must be some
special protocol between that browser and AOL's http proxy....

On Thu, 4 Aug 2005 20:24:21 +0100, "Dan Wood"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Can anyone offer any ideas as to why a connection with AOL would suddenly
>start to be 'selective' like this? I have power cycled the router, and
>double-checked the settings in it but that hasn't helped. All the usual AOL
>'oddities' had already been catered for (things like MTU=1400) and the
>connection has worked for 12 months or so previously.

have you set the new PC MTU to 1400, as well as the router. Ebay is
one site that will croak if you have a router MTU below 1500 and don't
change the PC to match. drtcp.exe and change the MTU on the relevant
adapter.

A diagnostic procedure is to ping with big packets
ping www.bbc.co.uk -l 1600 works on my PC (1500 MTU via Demon)

ping www.google.com -l 1472 works but 1473 doesn't (that's a low case
L before the number)

so you can se how different sites / routes handle packets that need
fragmenting and in the BBC case do it properly but in Google's case
don't.

Phil
--
Tiscali - dialup speeds at Broadband prices, see
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist...&Board=tiscali

AOL - the unlimited ISP of choice for heavy downloaders.

> have you set the new PC MTU to 1400, as well as the router. Ebay is
> one site that will croak if you have a router MTU below 1500 and don't
> change the PC to match. drtcp.exe and change the MTU on the relevant
> adapter.

Thanks Phil, but I've already tweaked the new PC with DrTCP... Also a
'standard' length ping still fails, so I'd be very surprised if it was a
fragmenting issue.

If I get chance again, I will play with the length of the ping packets just
to see if there are two things broken though!

Cheers,
Dan.