sites not resolving - help!

hi all,
i'm having problems with certain sites being inaccessible. sites
affected include www.ebay.co.uk (actually may be one of the subdomains
like signin.ebay.co.uk), www.microsoft.com and others. sites that
work, the vast majority, are nice and quick.
i'm connected via plusnet adsl and a 4 port linksys 54G wireless
router. it's not the client PC: anything on my side exhibits the same
problem, including apple macs.
when i tracert the sites they time out after a few hops.

the weird thing is that when i used to be on pipex adsl, the same thing
happened. i could get around it by using their webproxy, but naked to
the internet it did the same thing intermittently to the same sites.

i've changed my router from my old cheapo conexant one for the new
linksys and it's made no difference.

now, if it's not the ISP, it's not the client, it's not the router - i
can't really bring myself to believe that the wires between BT and me
don't like certain websites - so where do i go from here?

have tried tweaking MTU and it's made no difference, and pipex and
plusnet can't see problems from their end.

is it possible that there's something odd going on with the BT ADSL
product on my line? DNS caches out of date? routing problems?

i'm tearing my hair out here so any help would be much appreciated...

ric
replace publicmail with anything else to reply...

ric wrote:
> hi all,
> i'm having problems with certain sites being inaccessible. sites
> affected include www.ebay.co.uk (actually may be one of the subdomains
> like signin.ebay.co.uk), www.microsoft.com and others. sites that
> work, the vast majority, are nice and quick.
> i'm connected via plusnet adsl and a 4 port linksys 54G wireless
> router. it's not the client PC: anything on my side exhibits the same
> problem, including apple macs.
> when i tracert the sites they time out after a few hops.
>
> the weird thing is that when i used to be on pipex adsl, the same thing
> happened. i could get around it by using their webproxy, but naked to
> the internet it did the same thing intermittently to the same sites.
>
> i've changed my router from my old cheapo conexant one for the new
> linksys and it's made no difference.
>
> now, if it's not the ISP, it's not the client, it's not the router - i
> can't really bring myself to believe that the wires between BT and me
> don't like certain websites - so where do i go from here?
>
> have tried tweaking MTU and it's made no difference, and pipex and
> plusnet can't see problems from their end.
>
> is it possible that there's something odd going on with the BT ADSL
> product on my line? DNS caches out of date? routing problems?
>
> i'm tearing my hair out here so any help would be much appreciated...
>
> ric
> replace publicmail with anything else to reply...
>

Check your "Hosts" files to see if the sites are listed there.If they
are listed you will have no access to them.to gain access remove them
from the list.

I had a similar problem recently, In my case it turned out to be some
strange routes that had been added to my router's route table.

I couldn't get to www.adobe.com and anything else that began with 192

Try getting the ip address of the sites that you can't get to.
See if they have any common digits at the start. (the two you mentionned
don't)

hope you get it sorted.

cleared the route table, flushed dns on clients, no commonality between
the sites that i can see.
i've a colleague at work who's got the same problem (different UK ISP)
for sites like www.tesco.com, www.amazonc.co.uk etc.

it's driving me mad...

can anyone give me a guide to tweaking MTU on the router, not the
client, to see if that helps?
ric

"ric" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) oups.com...
> cleared the route table, flushed dns on clients, no commonality between
> the sites that i can see.
> i've a colleague at work who's got the same problem (different UK ISP)
> for sites like www.tesco.com, www.amazonc.co.uk etc.
>
> it's driving me mad...
>
> can anyone give me a guide to tweaking MTU on the router, not the
> client, to see if that helps?
> ric
>

I have a different router to you. i have the SAR715+
I had similar problems a while ago.
I turned out that the lan port on my router was using the subnet mask
255.0.0.0 instead of 255.255.255.0 so some sites werent resolving.
Probably not the same problem on yours but it maybe worth a look.

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 09:28:27 +0000, ric wrote:

> hi all,
> i'm having problems with certain sites being inaccessible. sites
> affected include www.ebay.co.uk (actually may be one of the subdomains
> like signin.ebay.co.uk), www.microsoft.com and others. sites that work,
> the vast majority, are nice and quick. i'm connected via plusnet adsl
> and a 4 port linksys 54G wireless router. it's not the client PC:
> anything on my side exhibits the same problem, including apple macs.
> when i tracert the sites they time out after a few hops.
>
> the weird thing is that when i used to be on pipex adsl, the same thing
> happened. i could get around it by using their webproxy, but naked to
> the internet it did the same thing intermittently to the same sites.
>
> i've changed my router from my old cheapo conexant one for the new
> linksys and it's made no difference.
>
> now, if it's not the ISP, it's not the client, it's not the router - i
> can't really bring myself to believe that the wires between BT and me
> don't like certain websites - so where do i go from here?
>
> have tried tweaking MTU and it's made no difference, and pipex and
> plusnet can't see problems from their end.
>
> is it possible that there's something odd going on with the BT ADSL
> product on my line? DNS caches out of date? routing problems?
>
> i'm tearing my hair out here so any help would be much appreciated...
>
> ric
> replace publicmail with anything else to reply...

Have you tried hard-coding the DNS server addresses in the PC's TCP
properties, just to rule out possible shortcomings in the router's DNS
proxying? I would next try hard-coding someone else's DNS servers at the
PC end - although on Plus.net, I use Freeserve's DNS from time to time - just
stick 195.92.195.94 and 195.92.195.95 in the DNS Server field.

Rgds

Eric Lee

not dns: have tried everyone's DNS servers and they're all doing the
same thing...

"ric" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) ups.com...
> not dns: have tried everyone's DNS servers and they're all doing the
> same thing...

Suggest its either your 'hosts' file or

if your rwin is set too high some sites wont allow access (dont ask me why)

reset rwin to somewhere between say 13000 to 60000 (better still test your
connection at dslreports.com)

P

On the Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:19:58 -0000, Peter Hayward uttered forth the
following...
> > not dns: have tried everyone's DNS servers and they're all doing the
> > same thing...
>
> Suggest its either your 'hosts' file or
>

What you haven't explanied to him is that if it is in the hosts file it
may well have an address of 127.0.0.1 but then again what's the
likelyhood of all his machines having the same hosts file.

"Sean" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed) T...
> On the Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:19:58 -0000, Peter Hayward uttered forth the
> following...
> > > not dns: have tried everyone's DNS servers and they're all doing the
> > > same thing...
> >
> > Suggest its either your 'hosts' file or
> >
>
> What you haven't explanied to him is that if it is in the hosts file it
> may well have an address of 127.0.0.1 but then again what's the
> likelyhood of all his machines having the same hosts file.

The OP says that "when I tracert them they time out after a few hops"

This rules out DNS not resolving, as tracert would not start if the name was
unresolved.

If the hosts file was redirecting to 127.0.0.1, then the tracert would reply
in one hop, or reply invalid if 0.0.0.0 is used.

MTU's can be a problem. O jave mine set at 1444 now, seems low and I cant
remember how I got there, but if you can find a problem, site that responds
to pings, try ping -f -1 1450 hostname until you get a size that gets
through, and set MTU to that.

Tracert only works if the site responds to pings, both Microsoft and ebay
time out whan I tracert them, but I can access them with no problem through
http.