Router won’t open certain sites

[Silly John Fatty]

I have a weird issue right now. My router won’t open a lot of sites. Basically for every 2nd or 3rd site, it tells me it can’t be opened. Amongst them are big sites like Apple.com or Paypal.com.

I’ve tried it on my iPhone, connected to the Wifi. Won’t work either. Tried without the Wifi, and suddenly it works.

I was told to reset Safari. I did that, and some sites did work better (sometimes the styles of the sites are missing), but a lot of them, including Paypal, still don’t work.

Anyone know what’s happening here?

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Nobody knows? It’s extremely annoying, also what I need to mention again is that the stylesheet of a site often won’t load – but the site itself will. What the heck is going on here?

 

[hiddenmarkov]

have you unplugged main line coming in to the router to direct line connect into the mac?

If you suspect bad router it be best to remove it from the equation. Hardwired in and computer works fine you can troubleshoot that router or replace.

If a consumer router not much to troubleshoot beyond undoing any changes you made of late. Or reboot ( I am assuming you did this). Or a hail mary pass with firmware update if one is available

Since on phone and computer I don't see putting a 3rd party browser having an effect but could try that as well.

have you done any customization to your safari? Not fully related to this but today I had to show my devs (I work in windows based company fwiw) how to access the web portal to our maintenance ticket system. 1 out of 4 devs was not working on his computer using IE (web app only likes that one). That 1 dev could render the site on another computer no issues. Problem resoution: he had to to find what ever crap he tacked on to his browser for developer reasons was causing the problem.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

have you unplugged main line coming in to the router to direct line connect into the mac?

If you suspect bad router it be best to remove it from the equation. Hardwired in and computer works fine you can troubleshoot that router or replace.

If a consumer router not much to troubleshoot beyond undoing any changes you made of late. Or reboot ( I am assuming you did this). Or a hail mary pass with firmware update if one is available

Since on phone and computer I don't see putting a 3rd party browser having an effect but could try that as well.

have you done any customization to your safari? Not fully related to this but today I had to show my devs (I work in windows based company fwiw) how to access the web portal to our maintenance ticket system. 1 out of 4 devs was not working on his computer using IE (web app only likes that one). That 1 dev could render the site on another computer no issues. Problem resoution: he had to to find what ever crap he tacked on to his browser for developer reasons was causing the problem.

Yeah I did try resetting the router, and also using a different browser — still didn’t work. I later tried some of the sites that didn’t work on a computer that is connected with Ethernet, and they didn’t work either. It’s our internet or the modem.

Some time after resetting the router now everything works again, and even faster I have the feeling.

But there’s a construction site down the road and apparently they’re putting new internet/telephone wires or something, might be related to my issue. Also because it started working again after ~17h, that’s the time when some people stop working. I should have checked if they were still working there when I passed the place on my way home. I have the feeling there wasn’t anyone anymore around 16h or so, so probably it’s unrelated, even though some other people have seen the van of a network company.

 

[syobwoc]

I wonder if your ISP is having DNS issues... A quick test would be to change the dns server on your adapter settings to something like OpenDns. Might not be the issue, but it's worth checking it out. Hope this helps!

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Ha, it seems to work! What exactly does this mean? Can I continue to browse the internet with the OpenDNS (from http://www.opendns.com) or is that “dangerous”?

 

[Weaselboy]

Ha, it seems to work! What exactly does this mean? Can I continue to browse the internet with the OpenDNS (from http://www.opendns.com) or is that “dangerous”?

Not dangerous at all. Many people actually prefer to use OpenDNS.

 

[syobwoc]

Ha, it seems to work! What exactly does this mean? Can I continue to browse the internet with the OpenDNS (from http://www.opendns.com) or is that “dangerous”?

awesome! good to hear that worked. I've used OpenDNS before too and it's been great. You can set it up on your local machine or your router. If its at the router level, it should also work for other devices without having to manually edit the settings for each device. It's a quick change than can easily be reversed.

 

[hiddenmarkov]

Ha, it seems to work! What exactly does this mean?

Most likely your ISP has either DNS issues (corruption or poisoning). And can't seem to route to higher dns sources either.


DNS in nutshell:

You want to go to ABC.com. That name needs to now resolve to an ip address to access.

If your device does not know what it is (you keep locak DNS files for common resources you visit, or you can hardcode it into a hosts file) it asks ISP DNS
for help finding the ip basically.


If ISP DNS knows it tells your device. If it doesn't, it passes the DNS query up higher to a DNS resoource that might.

At some point you may even get to major DNS servers that run the internet world. If they don't know, site does not exist or your region has massive issues (I have seen DNS fubared for the asian area once for a few hours...a very important DNS source for the region was not having a good day)


Clearly your DNS at ISP was broken in some way. Apparently so is/was their routing to higher level DNS servers.

All open dns did for you basically was skip over you ISP and went to a higher source. All good, nothing bad here.