[kolymsky]

I work in a small school and recently we started to have a problem with browsing the internet. We don't have an 'IT Department' as such as I'm the closest thing to it.

When a browser is opened it will not connect to the homepage, or if it does its generally from cache, instead an error message about not being able to connect to server will appear. Now if you hit refresh you might or might not connect to the webpage in question but you can gurantee that it will take a long time to make that connection even on an undemanding site like wikipedia.

The odd thing is that when connected to a speed checker it gives no surprising results, speed is normal. Also when downloading a file or the latest linux live distribution torrent I can achieve maximum speeds available to us.

We use a selecction of Macs & PCs mostly connecting through ethernet cabling although connecting wirelessly is no different. We use BT 2Wire 2700HGV Business Hubs. I can't think of any changes our end that have happened to cause this and our internal network connections run just fine. I have tried pinging from the command line and it looks ok to my limited expertise, no lost packets.

Any help or advice that can be given would be great.

Oh BTW, most of the Macs are on static IPs but it makes no difference to the issue as those others using DHCP also have the problem.

 

[Wand3r3r]

what ip addresses are the workstations pointed to for dns?

 

[Troy_Jollimore]

How recently? As of last week I've been getting the same thing with any 'new' Windows XP machine that I set up on my network. Flushing and re-registering DNS entries sometimes does the trick, but it seems to be more 'time-related'. If I wait long enough, things just start working.

One thing to try is to get the IP address of an external site. Type that directly into your browser to see if it works. Then, try it on an affected machine. Early enough on, my systems won't even connect this way, although all local IP connections work fine.

 

[kolymsky]

what ip addresses are the workstations pointed to for dns?

The 8 workstations are pointed to 192.168.1.10

How recently? As of last week I've been getting the same thing with any 'new' Windows XP machine that I set up on my network. Flushing and re-registering DNS entries sometimes does the trick, but it seems to be more 'time-related'. If I wait long enough, things just start working.

One thing to try is to get the IP address of an external site. Type that directly into your browser to see if it works. Then, try it on an affected machine. Early enough on, my systems won't even connect this way, although all local IP connections work fine.

About 5 weeks or so. The issue is constant although worse at some times than others, I have tried putting in googles ip address and that worked fine although I admit I didn't take it any further than that at the time.

I could try flushing the DNS of the 25 machines involved but I really don't think that is the root of the problem due to the fact that TTL (time to live) should take care of that by requesting a new entry for old cached items and this wouldn't explain why new addresses are also affected and my laptop works fine at home but not at the school. :4-dontkno