h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have my laptop in a sleepout at the moment. The router is the house, approx 10 metres away. I'm using built in wireless to connect to the internet.

My internet connection drops fairly often, more on wireless than ethernet (which I use when in the house 'cos it's faster).

Because I'm out in another building I can't be bothered going and turning the router off and on all the time. What's weird is that often I can carry on browsing on h2g2 when all other sites are no longer available (and my mac says there is no internet connection).

I thought it must be loading from the cache, but I've just gone to a page I've never visited before and it opens fine (the PS of someone who just joined this week).

How is it possible that I can access h2g2 (including posting) and not the rest of the webs?

??

Telepathy?

The magical powers of TPTB?

Seriously, I guess most internet sites require you to load lots of graphics and stuff, whereas h2g2 is kept fairly simple. The rest of my family are playing online games, and the slightest fluctuation may cause the game to be interrupted for a split second, causing their avatars to die - while I browse h2g2 and don't even realise there are fluctuations.

The BBC actually transmits directly into your brain. It is merely an optical illusion that makes it appear on a computer screen.

RF

We're all part of the Matrix...

Hotel California

>>
Seriously, I guess most internet sites require you to load lots of graphics and stuff, whereas h2g2 is kept fairly simple. The rest of my family are playing online games, and the slightest fluctuation may cause the game to be interrupted for a split second, causing their avatars to die - while I browse h2g2 and don't even realise there are fluctuations.
<<

I don't get a fluctuation though. I get disconnected from the internet. But I can still browse h2g2. The only way I can get back on the rest of the webs is to reboot the router.

Last night when it happened I turned off airport (the wireless connection on the mac), and then turned it on again, and no more h2g2 until I rebooted the router.

Ok, now you've piqued me curiousity bump..

Next time your mb disconnects from all the web except for hootoo, open a terminal and type:

ping -c2 google.co.uk

If you're still connected to teh innerwebs, you'll see a response something like this:

PING google.co.uk (74.125.127.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from pz-in-f99.1e100.net (74.125.127.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=55.3 ms
64 bytes from pz-in-f99.1e100.net (74.125.127.99): icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=63.1 ms

--- google.co.uk ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 55.315/59.250/63.185/3.935 ms

If not, after a bit of a wait you'll see something like:

unknown host: google.co.uk

Will do

When it happens and I run the network diagnostics, it says that I am connected to the ISP but not the internet or server. I've never really known what that means, and why rebooting the router would make a difference. If I am actually connected to the ISP but not the internet then surely the problem isn't in the router, it's with the ISP. They of course always say it's not at their end.

It could be their nameserver isn't doing its job.

In the router settings, there's a bit where you can specify different or additional nameservers.

You can use free dns servers such as dyndns or opendns

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/free-dns-server/

Of course it hasn't dropped the connection at all today

Thanks for the link

You're not just getting cached / stored pages are you? i.e. your browsing on H2G2 brings up new, updated pages.

Would the cache be storing pages I haven't been too though? And in the past when it's loaded from the cache, my convo list has been out of date. That's not happening now.

Ok, the internet connection has dropped, I can't open non-h2g2 pages, and the ping test is showing as 'unknown host'.

I can open h2g2 pages I've visited and reply boxes. I can open the advanced search page and do a search and open pages from that I know I've never been to before. I've gone to who's online by ID and opened up a newbie page I've not visited before.

I've gone to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/info?cmd=conv and opened the most recent post on the site, an Ace-ing of a newbie, and it's loaded fine.

Sometimes the h2g2 pages take a while to load, but that's not unusual for hootoo.

So I can't find an h2 page that I can't open. But I can't access the rest of the webs.

BBC homepage doesn't open.

Can't clear emails.

I've tried opening my ISP's homepage and google, both of which should be cached, but they eventually time out and tell me I'm not connected to the internet.

When I run network diagnostics, it tells me I am connected to the ISP but not the internet or server.

And obviously I can post here too


I'm really looking forward to an explanation now

Wow that is strange.

Reminds me of the time about 20 years ago I saw a feature on teletext that allowed you to phone up and change pages via your phone keypad I tried it and after a pause of a few seconds the pages changed to whatever I had typed into the phone !! Bearing in mind this was before the days of cable connections etc to specific account numbers - General TV signal through the air only ...

Never got an explanation as to how that one worked.

DNS converts a hostname (localhost, example.net, bbc.co.uk, etc.) to an IP address (127.0.0.1, 192.0.32.10, 212.58.246.158, etc.). So if DNS is down you'll be connected fine to anything you were connected to before, but you won't be able to connect to any new website.

But you said you can't see the BBC homepage either. That's odd. It could be that somehow your connection to a specific server is holding, and your connection to other servers is failing (DNA sites run on Microsoft IIS while the rest of the BBC runs on Apache, so the homepage would be a different server), but I'm not sure how that would work.

If it is a DNS problem, you can, as Talisen said, set up other DNS servers instead of your ISP's defaults. (Some DNS servers, if you type in the name of a domain which doesn't exist, will serve you ads.)

TRiG.

Following from what TRiG said, if you type

ping -c2 74.125.127.99

in a terminal, and it connects, but if you type

ping -c2 google.co.uk

and it does not, it strongly indicates a DNS failure.

Sorry, I lost track of this thread.

I've been using an ethernet cable recently, and getting lots of disconnects again. I rang my ISP and got told that it's possibly at their end. Something about their backend resetting account profiles monthly and for some reason mine's not working so they're doing it daily and this is causing the disconnects. Only they're recording disconnects when my laptop and router are off, and have no record of the disconnects I'm experiencing.

Another thing in the past week or so is that the URL goes to load, gets part way through and then stops with the URL in the address bar and a completely blank page (i.e. no message from the mac telling me I'm not connected to the internet).

And the other one is that a webpage will load, but it keeps loading forever and doesn't stop until I make it stop manually (not all webpages, and obviously I haven't tried forever ).

Does any of that make sense or mean anything. Should I give up now, or just nuke the thing from space?

>> Never got an explanation as to how that one worked.

That phone - teletext thing's spooky.

Kea, I had similar problems before I moved. I'd lose connection to some websites but not all of them. I was using a phone-line based ADSL connection from TalkTalk and a wireless router. I concluded that the whole thing was so fragile that any straw on any camel's back could break it. Different fixes worked at different times.

Using TalkTalk's own wireless router helped for a while.

Being directly plugged in to the router and not using wireless helped, but involved trailing wires throughout the house.

Various phonecalls to TalkTalk's help desk helped, though they swore blind they only ran diagnostics and didn't change anything.

The most recent fix was using System Mechanic to optimise the settings on my PC for the kind of Internet connection I had.

As I said, I think the set-up was so held together with string that it could and did break in all sorts of places.

Now I'm on a cable connection, not a phone line DSL and the wireless router's in the same room and - fingers crossed - all seems to be ok.

Ben