Thirith on 18/10/2008 at 18:40
My girlfriend and I are currently in the States, staying at a hotel that has free wireless internet access. We're mainly using my girlfriend's laptop, a Win XP machine.
Until yesterday it worked fine, but yesterday evening we weren't able to connect to the internet any more. The computer says we connect to the router just fine, there's a fairly strong Wifi connection, but neither Firefox nor IE7 connect us to the internet. Similarly, the anti-virus programme times out on trying to update itself, and so do pings from DOS.
Strangely enough, my work machine (Vista) connects without any problems and gets us onto the internet.
I tried to restore the XP machine to an earlier state, but while the restore worked it's still not getting me online.
Any idea what might be causing this and how we could fix the machine? Any help would be much appreciated.
TBE on 18/10/2008 at 23:00
Most hotels in the US require a new "Agree to these terms" thing every 24 hours. Try clearing history and cookies then trying to logon to the hotels initial page. I think I was using Internet Explorer sometimes when I was traveling, only because the hotel I stayed at didn't like Firefox.
Lansing on 18/10/2008 at 23:13
Three things normally stop internet traffic:
1) IP redirecting - i..e web pages that require authentication such as those that Taffer_Boy has pointed out. Normally it's pretty obvious as soon as you go to a web page.
2) Misconfigured DNS. Check the properties for your internet connection and make sure it's set to "automatic" both for IP address and DNS address.
3) Misconfigured routing information. Start up a command prompt and type "ROUTE PRINT". The gateway for the 0.0.0.0 network destination should be the IP address of your router. If not then you'll probably have problems.
There are many other possibilities but you say that it's worked up to now for you so they're less likely.
Thirith on 19/10/2008 at 01:42
Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately they don't work. The wifi network doesn't require authentification (the XP laptop worked just fine for 16 days or so); both IP and DNS are allocated automatically, and the 0.0.0.0 gateway is the IP address of the router. :(
Lansing on 19/10/2008 at 20:58
The next step I'd normally take would be to try and see where network packets are being rejected. A traceroute (tracert on Windows) is not conclusive but is useful for finding out if they're being trapped locally. Given that you have another laptop that works, it's not likely but comparing results may be useful.
Could you have installed some other local firewall software? It's not common, but I've seen some blocking programs be a little over-enthusiastic about where they allow internet traffic.
Thirith on 20/10/2008 at 00:33
I'll try the traceroute. I don't think I installed any firewall software, and even if I did, shouldn't restoring the computer to a state prior to it not working any more have done the trick?
In any case, we're going back home on Wednesday, and right now I'm sort of hoping that the problem will resolve itself once I'm trying to connect to the router at home. If that doesn't work, I'll also be in a better position to call up our local support people. Thanks for your suggestions, in any case!
Edit: Doing a tracert on anything beyond the hotel's router gets exactly to the router and then gets stuck.
