Something odd’s going on with web access at our house.
I use my notebook computer at the table over a WiFi connection to Margie’s PC. Margie’s PC dials up and shares the Internet connection with me. She runs Norton Security as her firewall.
On an regular, and increasing basis, I find that some sites just don’t respond off of my machine. IE will sit there and hum away, and either eventually come back site-unfound, or else never time out.
This never happens at the office, which makes me think it’s not my machine.
The sites themselves seem to vary. We’re not talking about new, untried addresses, but places like Google and MSNBC and various blogs in the blogroll. Things that I know work.
Rebooting my machine doesn’t do anything. Rebooting Margie’s sometimes does something to help, it seems, but usualy not.
The problem usually gets progressively worse over time. Everything might be fine on a Friday afternoon, but by Sunday it seems like half the Internet is inaccessible.
I run ZoneAlarm on my machine, but disabling it doesn’t affect the problem.
The problem only affects my machine, not Margie’s. A site I cannot get to from my machine I can get to from hers with no trouble. That makes me think it’s not the ISP.
My only conclusion is that Norton Security is somehow progressively shutting off stuff routed from me to the Net, or from the Net to me. Why and how, I don’t know, and I don’t see messages in the log that indicate that to me.
Any thoughts?
Do you still have IP when it starts to lag? If you do an ipconfig /release ipconfig /renew, do you still get an IP? Can you traceroute (tracert) to anywhere?
I’ve found that our wireless (as you know) cuts out from our cordless phone, but not all the time. I also think the microwave effects it, and it may be affected by our own neighbors phones. I don’t know how close your neighbors are to you, though.
Thing is, it’s not all-or-nothing. I can still get to many sites, even most sites. Just not all sites. I can get to my blog, but not to Google. I can get to Instapundit, but not OpinionJournal. I can … you get the idea.
But good idea about trying to recycle IP, and trying to tracert the mysteriously missing sites. I’ll give it a try.
(Yeah, we had the WiFi/wireless phone conflict. Ended up replacnig our 2.4GHz phones with 900MHz — a lot cheaper, too.)