Why does this repair action work?

Hi All,

Windows XP.

Problem: I have several road warriors. When they get back
from their trailer parks or hotels, they can not browse
websites on their wireless at their homes or offices.

Symptom: both Firefox and IE can not resolve an address.
Ping and Nslookup can. If you copy and paste the IP
address from Ping or Nslookup into Firefox or IE,
both can open the IP's websites. Symptom happens with
or without the antivirus/firewall enabled.

Solution: go into the device manager and disable the
wireless card and re-enable it. Then, do a "repair"
on their network connection. (A repair by itself
does not work.)

Okay. Now I am confused. Why does this work?
And what am I actually doing to fix the thing?

Many thanks,
-T

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>,
Jeff Liebermann <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> There are other settings which also need to be tweaked for different
> locations. For example, available printers, static routes, SMTP
> servers, Windoze domain, time zone(?), etc. I use Netswitcher to
> accomplish these changes.
> <http://www.netswitcher.com> $20.
> I have one profile setup for each of my major customers so that I
> don't have to fumble with changing settings when I arrive with my
> laptop.

Macs have a "Locations" feature built in. It's a bit hard to set up (or
understand, I guess) but once it's working, it's okay. You generally
have to click the "renew dhcp lease" button when you change location
from wireless to wired. What I'd like is to change automatically when it
senses the Ethernet cable unplugged/plugged.
--
W. Oates

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

> Instead, I suggest:
>
> Start -> run -> cmd <enter>
> ipconfig /release
> (wait about 3-5 seconds>
> ipconfig /renew
> exit

Tried this several times. It does not work. The symptom
is that command line utilities (nslookup, ping) can
resolve IP addresses but Windows programs (Firefox, IE) can
not.

Reboots do not work either.

-T

Jeff Liebermann wrote:

> Weird. I have a few more guesses.
>
> First, try clearing the DNS cache. ping and nslookup may be using the
> resolver cache instead of doing a new lookup. Run:
> ipconfig /flushdns
> and try ping etc. again.
>

Now this seems to be very promising. I will be out at another
customer with this problem this week. I will try this first
before using the device manager.

Thank you!

-T

John Navas wrote:

> What is the _exact_ error message from Firefox?

address not found

> Do you have any proxy settings configured?
no

> Are DNS servers set to configure by DHCP or configured manually?
dhcp

> Have you checked the DNS server settings when this failure occurs?
no changes

> Are they changing or not?
no


Symptom: windows programs can not resolve addresses; command
line programs are able to. Disabling and reenabling the
wireless card in device manager cures the problem.

The original question was, why does this work?

My guess was that Jeff had it correct: flush the dns.
I am waiting for another instance of the problem to test
Jeff's theory.

-T