Goddamnit, it's doing it again.

[kierthos]

So, at home, I cannot connect to anything at worldofwarcraft.com (forums, server status, hell, the game itself), nor will Firefox admit that Livejournal is up (I'm posting this from work).

Same with Slashdot, Crispygamer, and a handful of other sites. It just times out.

But I can connect to google, yahoo, most of the webcomics I read, etc.

And while I can't get a connection to World of Warcraft, I can connect to City of Heroes to play it.

So, seriously, what the fuck? I've tried a few different things (ipconfig /dnsflush, for one) but they don't seem to help. Pinging the relevant servers just shows that it times out on ping, and tracert doesn't give me any extra useful information.

It seems to be an intermittent problem, as I was able to connect to LJ and WoW earlier in the day. But what the hell is causing it?

If anyone has any ideas, I can still read your responses (as LJs e-mail notification still seems to be working), but I will be unable to reply until I can once again get a connection to LJ from my home computer. (Actually, I fully expect that within five minutes of me posting this, my computer will go back to normal, but I still want to know why the hell it's acting up this way.)

Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

Comments

[burtonlabs.livejournal.com]

Yes. Your computer is subtly telling you to GO OUTSIDE! :)

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

If this were the case, I would not be able to connect to City of Heroes. Besides, people outside have the piggy flu.

[burtonlabs.livejournal.com]

Damn you and your Swine Flu logic.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

tracert doesn't give me any extra useful information.

It doesn't tell you where the packets are stopping? How far *does it get*?

What about nslookup. Run that from home and from work, see if you get the same target IP.

Have you got a router? Try rebooting it. If you're patched up to date and have a good firewall and AV suite, take out your router and plug your PC directly into your connection, and try again.

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

Turns out that Time Warner broke something. By the time I found this out and called them, their tech support guys were already getting flooded with calls from irate gamers about not being able to play WoW.

It's all good now.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I was going to say. It sounded like a bad router somewhere between you and half the internet, which implies a bad router on your ISP's side but not in your house.

And traceroute *should* show you that, and where it is, every time. Which is why I was so surprised when you said it didn't tell you anything.

[kierthos.livejournal.com]

*nod* Traceroute would get about 17 hops away and then time out. What made it really weird at the time was that one of the sites that I couldn't get to was (I thought) in Virginia, where most of the others were in California. (Although I could swear that CoH was based in California too, but I might be wrong about that.)

Anyway, hopefully it won't be a problem any more.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but run a half-dozen traces to different unreachable and reachable sites, and you should be able to call your ISP and say "Hey! Router X at address Y in location Z is broken!" and confuse the hell out of the first-level techs until they pass you to a L2 tech who understands what you're saying and can duplicate the problem himself, and has the authority to call NOC.