Really jacked up DNS problem

[primesuspect]

I do this crap for a living and I must say this vexes me:

My wife's laptop, a Dell Inspiron 600M has an Intel PRO/2100 802.11b integrated card, running XP Home SP1a. I've got a 128-bit WEP connection to my WAP (a linksys WAP11) and I use a crappy D-link router (i forget, but it's the 30-dollar variety).

The problem is that DNS on my wife's computer just stops working, constantly. It's not network related, as I have two other computers on the network that are fine and never have DNS problems.

I've tried using several different DNS servers - the one in the Dlink router, my company's DNS servers, my ISP's DNS servers, etc.. The problem exists no matter what DNS server I use, so it's not the servers.

Rebooting fixes the problem. Also, clicking on a link a few dozen times will also fix the problem. So, like when I fire up Firebird, I have short-media.com, addaboy.com, and icronticforums.com, in three seperate tabs, as my homepage group. Sometimes all three will load, sometimes none will, sometimes 1 or 2 of the three will. Refreshing the non-working tab about 10 times will suddenly get it to work.

Also, if I go into Services, and restart the DNS client service, everything works for a few minutes, but then DNS dies again.

WTF is going on? Any ideas?
:confused2

[Geeky1]

WTF is going on? Any ideas?

No, but I can suggest how you can fix it... format the drive and reinstall windows. That's the only "debugging" I do anymore... It's easier (and generally takes less time) to just reinstall windows than it is to debug the stupid thing...

[FormFactor]

Geeky1 said
WTF is going on? Any ideas?

No, but I can suggest how you can fix it... format the drive and reinstall windows. That's the only "debugging" I do anymore... It's easier (and generally takes less time) to just reinstall windows than it is to debug the stupid thing...

You know I have to agree with him. I keep a base build disk image on my net. If I cant fix a problem within 1 hour of pissin with it. Just re image that sucker.


15 minutes, problem solved.

If you dont have an image, you might try putting your routers IP as the second dns entry in your IP stack. Im probably wrong, but hey it might work. its worth a try.

[Necropolis]

Geeky1 said

No, but I can suggest how you can fix it... format the drive and reinstall windows. That's the only "debugging" I do anymore... It's easier (and generally takes less time) to just reinstall windows than it is to debug the stupid thing...

The only problem with doing it this way is you never find the problem. Yes, it fixes it this time but what if it happens again. You format again and again and again.

I prefer to get to the bottom of a problem so when it comes up again I know how to fix it - rather than format.

Just my 2p worth.

[Shorty]

Hello prime .. welcome to short-media forums! ;D hehe

Silly obvious questions but...

Have you run all recent Windows updates?

Have you updated the wireless NIC drivers?

Have you tried the rig with RJ45 instead of wireless and did it repeat the same problem?

Just a few thoughts, then we look further :)

[maxanon]

Re-install is the only entry in the MS troubleshooting guide.

Also, try to uninstall the router software (it may be buggy or conflicting with XP).

Read this KB: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;821400

[Enverex]

maxanon said
Also, try to uninstall the router software (it may be buggy or conflicting with XP).

What router software?

NS

[EMT]

Shorty said
Have you tried the rig with RJ45 instead of wireless and did it repeat the same problem?


Yeah, that's what I was about to suggest... ya never know what might be wrong and that would take the whole wireless pile out of the picture.

Just try changing the network configuration a lot and see when it works vs when it doesn't? Well, there's only so much you can do though...

Worst comes to worst you could take a network capture with Ethereal to see exactly what's going on with the DNS servers... e.g. just down vs doing something funny

Also check for packet loss, and try an nslookup through the whole server list (if you have more than 2).

Still, it sounds pretty screwy...

[kanezfan]

I say RMA it lol :D It's because you go to that adaboy site, that site is like a virus on the internet woot!

My cure for you. I've seen this exact problem, when I was using windows internet sharing, some sites just wouldn't come up on the client computers, but they'd come up right away on the host machine. anyways, I ran out and bought a crappy $30 siemens router only to have the same problem, so I gave in and installed a router linux distro (clarkconnect.org) on a spare PC and I haven't had any problems since.

[primesuspect]

I feel so refreshed! This is the first time I've asked for advice on this site!

Great site, guys! Keep up the good worK!

Geeky & FormFactor: I am also of the "reinstalling is faster" school, but I am interested in this problem for academic and professional reasons - it may come up with a client one day, and reinstalling is a bad option for clients.

[Straight_Man]

XP Pro can cache DNS. And XP can disable routing if a wireless connect is used at boot and if at boot it is out of range of a wireless connect or the signal is junked by electronic field noise.

Also, an inexpensive router can get busy and not feed DHCP until it is free-- and a very fast machine might time out waiting for DHCP and XP might then disable networking.

Rebooting forces a fresh DHCP fetch if lease time is up and\or a routing recheck. If a DHCP lease fetch fails, my box has been known the give itself a one-hour lease using last known DHCP IP for DHCP source, and a private IP for itself. Rebooting could fix as lease is rechecked with DHCP server on reboot.

Do ANY of those circumstances apply when you are having problems, and are you trying to use one network setup with multiple DHCP servers??? If the latter, it is quite possible that XP is confused and is tryign to use wrong DHCP IP with wrong server sometimes.

[primesuspect]

I have tried both DHCP and static IPs on my network, neither has any affect on the problem. Guess I should have specified that :)

[Shorty]

Try it with RJ45 :) and report back!

[Templar]

My guess would be you just have a screwy install of Windows. It isn't unheard of. I had a burned disk of Win2K once and installed it only to find that half the services were corrupt and wouldn't start. Good thing that wasn't my main OS disk :)

Have you ever formatted the Laptop?

I did some menial Active Directory in a Cisco class and the DNS server went crack-addict more than a few times. I still can't fix it because it was mission critical stuff for the class so I couldn't waste time trying to find out what happened, so I can only guess. I think I had to format it twice and redo all the PCs in the lab.

If you just want something to try, reinstall the TCP/IP protocol :D

[primesuspect]

It's a factory install of XP Home from Dell - not pirated or weird in any way.

[matrixx2k]

Here is a link that may be helpful to you: http://www.geekgirls.com/windowsxp_home_network.htm

Take a look at the step by step process on setting up ICS with Windows XP Home. I would also try to clear your DNS cache after changing DNS servres as listed DNS servers. go to the CMD line and do a ipconfig /flushdns then do a ipconfig /registerdns. After you obtain a valid IP address start to do some ping tests starting with the ISP DNs servers and then start pinging internet addresses to see if you can reach them ie. yahoo.com, google.com etc...

Try to do some nslookup tests to see if DNS is resolving names to addresses.
What if you put some hard coded host file entries on the pc experiencing DNS issues? Go to the root of c: and locate your system32 folder- drivers- etc. and click to open your hosts file. Place an entry in there for each of your ISP's DNS servers address and name and see if you can ping them or resolve the addresses through nslookup.

Hope that helps out!

[primesuspect]

well, being that this problem happened over three years ago, and it has since been solved, the link won't really help. But I appreciate the sentiment! ;D

I have no idea what I did to fix it. I know it's fixed now, and I know I never reinstalled wifey's laptop, so I must have figured it out somehow ;)

[gregb49]

DNS Problems – finally solved – WINXP Home SP2, upgrade from ME
Thanks for the advice here, after using the following steps, the problem has been solved. I hope this might help someone else with a similar problem
Initially I couldn't get on the internet but all the time Skype was working fine, so I knew this was not a hardware problem. I followed the following steps.




Scanned with an uptodate anti-virus programme (I used both AVAST and AVG)
Used chkdsk /f to ensure that there were no FAT errors (Or right click on the c: drive or your main drive and select tools, check the drive for errors by ticking both boxes – this will happen at next start up and is v slow)
Used WinsockXPFix.exe usually fixes this sort of problem
I deleted all evidence of an old copy of Norton Internet Security, ie files and folders and hundreds of registry entries.
Used Run, cmd then ipconfig I could see that the NIC was registering OK (Tip, use /? with these old DOS commands, ie ipconfig /? to see the rest of the 'switches' that are available to you, ie ipconfig /flushdns)
Used Msofts advice (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259/ ) to remove the winsock keys from the registry, in case they were corrupt. (Hint. Don't mess with the registry unless you know what you are doing). XP makes new shell entries for those two keys at reboot.
I also used the Netdiag tool from the Windows XP disk.
I also used netsh winsock reset at the command prompt (run and cmd)
Track down the hosts file (In windows\system32\drivers\etc) and open it with notepad. It should only contain an entry for 127.0.0.1 localhost. Delete this file – a new one will be created at reboot.
Spybot was useful in examining some problems as well, but was not fully functional without internet acess (I discovered that this machine had been infected with W32/Rbot-QJ is a network worm and IRC backdoor Trojan)
I included the ISPs DNS server information in the NIC TCPIP properties.
After this I could ping numbered URLs but not named URLs eg ping 212.58.254.252 worked fine but ping www.bbc.co.uk did not, so I knew that this was a DNS problem of some sort
Donwloaded XP SP3 (ISO) and loaded it. At this stage the computer told me that there was a norton firewall present. Dowloaded a norton removal tool – removed all hidden traces of Norton and internet access was restored.



Lessons learned. My dislike of Norton increased. It can be very difficult to remove, very invasive and troublesome in my experience. Just a personal view
You cannot do this without a second working computer
The easiest and by far the quickest route is to reinstall windows but this was not an option for me – it was not my computer.
Linux seems so much easier, to me but I understand that this is not an option for all. If you have put your home folder in a separate partition, then reinstalling the OS is a breeze. My favourite distro this month is gOS, based on Ubuntu.