Wireless inop

gprellwitz

gprellwitz

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Jun 19, 2005
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Grant Prellwitz
The wireless on one of my laptops running XP Home seems to have stopped working.

Message when doing an nslookup seems to point to the DNS servers being unavailable. This is the same wireless network that the iPad I'm posting from is connected to, with no network changes.

The laptop seems to be making the connection, but is unable to actually connect to any website. First noticed this a few nights ago, but haven't really tried any diagnoses until now.

The gateway is set to the router address, and I've turned the firewall (Comodo) off.

And if I boot the same hardware into Linux, it can connect to the same network without difficulty.

Any suggestions?
 
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I had a PC do that. I plugged in Google's public DNS servers, and it started working again.
http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

I would like to tell you what happened and why, but my knowledge of such things is limited. I can correctly spell DNS two out of three times.
 
Is this with Comcast internet? Comcast has trouble keeping its DNS servers up.

Switch to Google's DNS servers.
 
Is DHCP giving it the right DNS server info? ipconfig is your friend.

The other boxes may be caching DNS differently. Is the linux system on dual-boot running DNS server?
 
I don't have the laptop with me at the moment, so I cannot actually try anything out. :(

That being said, I had previously tried an ipconfig /flushdns to no avail. I didn't try /registerdns. There are other computers on the same network, both wired and wireless, that are not having difficulties. I do not recall right now what the ipconfig /all was showing or whether I am running a DNS server on the Linux side. I didn't specifically configure one, but if Ubuntu loads it by default I may be. I am using Comcast's DNS servers.
 
Okay.
ipconfig /all shows that the DNS server on both the laptop that isn't functioning and the netbook that is functioning on the same wireless network is the router, 192.168.1.1. As expected, ipconfig /registerdns didn't change anything.

Well, it looks as if the problem had to do with the Cisco VPN adapter I run. Even after switching the DNS server to Google, it said that it was checking the DNS servers associated with the Cisco VPN when I ran a dnslookup. Disabling the VPN adapter (which wasn't connected, but was apparently active) solved that problem.

Now on to see if I can get everything working together nicely. I'll work on that tomorrow!
 
That's pretty common with Cisco's VPN (and others, actually)... it sets up virtual interfaces that sometimes cause problems with routing and DNS, and they don't go completely away (even if the VPN link drops according to the client) until the VPN client is closed down, at which point it (usually) removes all the point-to-point virtual interface endpoints, and puts the routing table back the way it was before it was launched.

For their credit, Cisco usually fixes most of the problems with their VPN client relatively quickly (I'm looking at you, F5 Networks! GRRR!), and you may want to have a friend or sysadmin at the office who has a Cisco login with download privs, look to see if there's an updated version. I've had that fix things a number of times in the past on Cisco.

Now I'm on an )@$(*&#$@ F5 piece of garbage, and it's terrible. The only good thing about it is that you can completely hack around it's awful start-up junk on a web page and use a python script to launch the SSL VPN manually on any Unix-ish box. Hooray for hacks.
 
denverpilot said:
The only good thing about it is that you can completely hack around it's awful start-up junk on a web page and use a python script to launch the SSL VPN manually on any Unix-ish box.
Click to expand...

As noted in another thread, English is required in this board.
Please make a note of it. :D

The scary part is that I'm actually starting to understand some of what you say.
 
PilotAlan said:
As noted in another thread, English is required in this board.
Please make a note of it. :D

The scary part is that I'm actually starting to understand some of what you say.
Click to expand...

What he said was perfectly cromulent.
 
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