Browsers that won't browse

I can't always get to all sites with all browsers

[victor]

I run three or five browsers at one time.

Sometimes -- just sometimes -- some of them can't get to a site that the others can. For example, for the past two hours only IE could find WebmasterWorld. Both Opera and Mozilla reported being unable to connect to the server.

Rebooting doesn't solve the problem. But it usually goes away after an hour or two -- though it once persisted for two days.

There is no consistency as to which browsers will connect and which won't. But once a browser is down, it stays down for that site. It'll happily connect to any other site.

Anyone any ideas what is going on, or is it just a gremlin on my motherboard?

I'm on Win 98. IE 5.5, Opera 6.0, Mozilla 1.1, Lynx 2.8.3, and Amaya 7.0.

Thanks.

[Brett_Tabke]

Drop to a dos windown and do a traceroute to the site you are trying to connect too.

tracert webmasterworld.com

If you can get to it, then the connection is fine.

Also, try exiting and restarting your browser (ie this won't work), but Moz and Opera it should work ok.

Sounds to me like you have some local network problems. If you can get to a site with one browser, you should be able to with another (except ie).

[victor]

Thanks Brett.

It's certainly a puzzle -- as you say, if one works, they should all work, so the problem is almost certainly at my end. So why (say) opera is saying "could not locate remote server" while tracert and IE are working fine is a mystery.

But, clutching a small straw here (and probably revealing ignorance about the way DNS resolution works), could different browsers have different ways of resolving a domain name to an IP address? If so, the problem could be regional Internet congestion. I can't think of any other reason why a reboot won't clear it, but a wait of two hours might.

Hey this is my post number 256 -- a magic hex number :)

[Syren_Song]

When Windows programs get kinda glitchy, sometimes it helps to just go ahead and reinstall the program.

I've found that has cleared up unusual and unexplained problems in the past for me.

[victor]

Thanks syren_song - I'd forgotten the corrosive power of cruft to use the technical term. I must be at about Cruft Force 4.5 by now.

Cruft first (I think) defined at:
[ddj.com...]

[gph]

Just to let you know. I get exactly the same random load failures using, Moz 1.0 IE6 and Opera6 on Win98. I thought it was my cable connection but repeated attempts get the same failure. It lasts for a half hour or so then goes away.

I have noticed a pattern of it only happening during "rush hours"

[Syren_Song]

victor -

Thanks for the link. Seems my current cruft factor is bouncing between 5 and 6. It was up to about 7.8 several months ago before we rebuilt the blasted thing! <lol>

Of course, I'm lucky - my husband's old laptop's cruft factor is up to 8.5. <rotfl>

And they didn't give him the proper Win95 disk, so he can't even attempt a full reinstall. Needless to say, he isn't laughing, but then again, the laptop's about 6 years old right now and we're glad it can still log onto the web occasionally.

Hope the reinstall fixes your problems. ;)

[amznVibe]

when good browsers go bad - the next FOX special...

but seriously... I've seen that kind of behavior when my cablemodem loses the connect for some reason (dhcp lease expires, etc) IE will stall and that window is useless until I close it and then restart IE, maybe your ISP is having issues with their DNS server... is this just happening tonight?

if you are using Win2k try flushing the DNS cache with ipconfig /flushdns