Help - can't connect to one website - important [resolved]
 

Okay - after 6 hours I give up. Using veritzon usb wireless - can't connect to ANY united websites - always times out. This has gone on for 6 hours! I can connect to all other websites.

I've tried:

1) calling verizon - who reset my usb modem,etc. but can't explain why I can't connect to only one web site
2) spoken to UA websupport - who don't have a clue

before this I did the usual stuff:

rebooted computer
cleared cache, cookies
tried 2 different browsers
tried 2 different computers

Note - both usb modem and same computers were working fine for months until about 8 hours ago.

The united.com site is online so it isn't them. Make sure that DNS is working correctly ("nslookup www.united.com." at a command prompt should return 209.87.112.90). If it is busted on multiple computers that points to the connection.

Can you reach the website if you enter the IP-Adress instead of the name of the website?

First thing:

How to Flush DNS in Microsoft Windows

In Microsoft Windows, you can use the command ipconfig /flushdns to flush the DNS resolver cache:

C:\>ipconfig /flushdns

Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

You can also use the command ipconfig /displaydns to view the DNS resolver cache.

Second:

type tracert www.united.com and see if your PC can trace the route to the server


Third:

Do you have any firewall/URL-filtering software installed? Maybe for some reason United.com got into the block list.

Last thing: When your problem is solved please edit the thread title.

Try picking a different DNS provider, I'd suggest OpenDNS

www.opendns.com

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Just for fun I was playing around with this earlier when the first post was made

I can go to united.com and ual.com through the browser.

I can not go to it via the IP address, I get an Http/1.1 Service Unavailable message

I can not ping or tracert ual.com, united.com or the ip address. It resolves for ual and united.com, but the packets time out on the path. It's been doing that all day from this machine.

I can get to the website from the blackberry browser though by just the ip address.

So there be something weird out there along the way, I should not have issues going by IP and it should tracert and ping it fine. It may not be you

Not necessarily. Some sites or providers drop all ICMP traffic to avoid DoS attacks. That would explain the failed ping and tracert sessions. Browsing by IP with HTTP/1.1 can have issues if host headers are in play. I'd say that it still is inconclusive one way or the other.

Telneting to port 80 on the IP address should answer as that happens before the "GET" command is issued and so host headers wouldn't get in the way at that point.

Yeah, that seems to be what DNS stuff was saying too about the ping and tracert

There appears to be a firewall at (hop 11) that blocks ICMP (ping) packets.
There appears to be a firewall at (hop 11) that blocks unwanted UDP packets.
There appears to be a firewall at 174.133.202.225 (hop 1) that blocks unwanted TCP packets.

So yesterday I couldn't get on to any ua website using either url or ip address (includinng ones in other countries - guess they all go through the same main route)-and pings failed but pings to websites I could get to failed also so I didn't know what to make of that. Today woke up and everything works fine! ??????

I think there is definitely something funny going on on their end - cordelli and others thanks for helping try to maintain my sanity:p

It was most likely a DNS problem on the Verizon end. A way to solve this is to set your DNS servers to the OpenDNS servers another poster suggested above (Google their Web site and they will have walk-through information if it happens again and you want to try to set it up). This has been known to be a problem on occasion with the UA Web site, though there is nothing they can really do or the ISP can do except for waiting for the system to cycle. However, by changing the DNS provider on your computer you may be able to counter any problems.

You could also add it to your hosts file if there continues to be a problem, totally bypassing outside DNS at all.

could you give a simple explantion of how to add something to a host file (starting from I don't know what a host file is:o)

c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

It is a text file (you can open it in notepad) and has a pretty simple format. At the bottom you put the IP address, a tab and then the domain name. There are at least two names you'd need for United, www.united.com and travel.united.com.

I would strongly advise against the hosts file solution, for two reasons:

1. Many companies use organizations like Akamai that dynamically return a specific host IP address depending on a range of factors including the geographic location of the browser connecting to it, how busy a server is, etc.

2. The IP address of the server could very easily change from time to time for other reasons, most likely right after you've forgotten you statically created this entry in the hosts file :)

The opendns solution is the best one by far. It's amazing how many times I've seen people caught out by the hosts file when they are certain the problem is further into the network.