What's wrong with my Internet connection?

February 14, 2008 3:27 PM

Please help me diagnose this mysterious Internet problem. I can't connect to a few websites in the normal way -- for example I can't connect to IMdB.com if the URL begins with "www". But I can connect if I remove the prefix. There are a few other websites I'm having similar problems with. What's going on here?

I'm using the latest Firefox 2 on a Macbook Pro. I tried using Firefox 3 and same problems. Safari also has the same problem. What's the best procedure for sorting out what's wrong here? Thank you!

posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese to computers & internet (8 comments total)

This is only a guess, but have you tried clearing the cache?
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:32 PM on February 14, 2008

I just tried that, qxntpqbbbqxl, but no luck. Do you have any more ideas?
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 3:48 PM on February 14, 2008

Are you behind a corporate firewall? Maybe some domain name variants (but crucially not all) are blocked.
posted by galaksit at 3:48 PM on February 14, 2008

I had this problem, started out of nowhere on Leopard for no particular reason. Also had trouble getting Adium to connect to certain chat servers. Fixed it by adding OpenDNS's DNS servers to my Network properties and fixed it.
posted by gramcracker at 3:56 PM on February 14, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oops, forgot to mention that I'm at home. I'm using a wireless router, and (I just checked this now) other computers using this connection have the same issue.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 3:59 PM on February 14, 2008

No great ideas about the cause, but you can diagnose the problem further. If the problem is with your ISP's name server, then taking it out of the loop should work:

http://www.imdb.com = http://207.171.166.140/

And if that's the case, then gramcracker's suggestion should do the trick
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 4:03 PM on February 14, 2008

It appears the problem was with the ISP's name server, as you suggested, qxntpqbbbqxl. And gramcracker's solution fixed it. Thanks to all of you.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 4:09 PM on February 14, 2008

I've had the same thing from time to time, along with a general unreliability of getting to sites. And once I couldn't get to a site, the browser would immediately go right to my ISPs search page from then on. As mentioned above, I changed my name servers to opendns.com's and have had very few problems since then.
posted by The Deej at 8:55 PM on February 14, 2008