Hi
I've been running White Russian on a WRT54G for a couple of years with no problems. A few months ago, I began seeing "Address Not Found" errors when using Firefox. Almost always the solution was to click the Try Again button and the URL would open successfully. Very rarely I had to click Try Again twice. Subsequently I began seeing a similar type error in my email client, and then in other applications that access the internet. I have a small LAN. Some machines are wired, some are wireless. All are seeing this problem. I am now running unattended applications that access the internet and these failures are costing me money.

My guess is that an application issues a request to convert a domain name into an IP and gets back an error indicating the conversion could not be made. Since it's happening on all machines and the Lynksys/WhiteRussian is my gateway, I assume the problem is there. Also, I can think of no single change I made on all machines that would cause this to appear everywhere simultaneously. Some machines are running XP, some Vista, one Linux (SuSE).

I'm a programmer, but not a unix or hardware head. The LAN has been stable for so long I don't want to mess with it.

Does anyone agree that the Lynksys/WhiteRussian is the most likely cause of the problem? Should I reinstall WhiteRussian? Reflash the BIOS? Is there a log I can look at that might help me understand what is or is not going on? I appreciate all your ideas.

Thanks

Woah woah!

Reflashing?  Hold horses.

Check what DNS you refer to and whether those IP are responding correctly.

Problem does not appear to be DNS specific. If I google something and click around in the results, sooner or later I get an Address Not Found. Same if I go to Yahoo and just start clicking on links. Same if I click around the WRT forum for a while. Can always recover by clicking Try Again, telling me something is failing intermittantly, but not consistently wrong.

Why do you think DNS is *not* important here?

Every time you click something with a hostname, a lookup occurs.

If the DNS servers you have listed are sometimes returning quick results and sometimes not returning at all, you will get intermittent works / doesn't behaviour.

Go to command-line use the nslookup command repeatedly on hostnames that are giving you problems and see what happens.

Do more debugging, give more data, you will get better answers from any forum.

OK. I looked up the URL of my ISP

nslookup www.pon.net

100 times and got 100 identical responses.

C:\Users\david>nslookup www.pon.net
Server:  UnKnown
Address:  192.168.1.1:53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    www.pon.net
Address:  216.229.98.95

Then I opened my ISP's home page in my browser and started randomly clicking links. I happened to get an Address Not Found on the 7th click. That link happened to be to www.teamthree.com. So I went back to the command line and did 100 nslookup on www.teamthree.com. I got the same response each time:

C:\Users\david>nslookup www.teamthree.com
Server:  UnKnown
Address:  192.168.1.1:53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    www.teamthree.com
Address:  216.229.98.173

I did 100 nslookup on 2 other URLs and got consistent results. I didn't do any additional browser clicking.

I did all this on one computer. I didn't try anything on any of the others.

nslookup appears to be working fine. I don't know how much it has in common with the way other apps on my machine access the web. I wonder if an Address Not Found makes a log entry that might tell me more about the error. I don't see anything helpful in the Windows event viewer.

Thanks

Lots of things could be wrong, may be router maybe not.

Tried pings to those websites to see if they are intermittently unresponsive?

Does your un-named ISP do web-caching that might be flaky?

One way to black-box determine router problem or not would be remove the
router from the picture entirely. Connect PC directly to internet connection just
make sure your software firewall is on.  If problem persists with the PC then
it's not the router.