DNS issue

SoozyJ22

Hi, I have a really confusing issue which appears to be DNS related, but I don't really understand how DNS works so I don't know what I can do to resolve it.

For the last 6 months or so I've had issues accessing my friend's website from home. It's somewhat intermittent but more often than not the first time I try to access the site I'll get a page not found error, but if I refresh right away it loads no problem. That was happening on my old laptop with XP and using both Firefox (2.0.0.12) and IE (7.0.5730.11) - but only when using the laptop at home, not ever when travelling.

Now, I have a new laptop which uses Vista (premium edition). Again, my access to my friend's site is intermittent, but it's a lot worse - I've not been able to get on at all today.
I'm running the same version of firefox, but when I refresh after the initial error it doesn't seem to even try to look up the site again unless I leave it for 5 or 10 minutes. Refreshing straight away gives the 'not found' page right away so it seems it's looking at a cache somewhere. To start with I'd clear the cache when that happened and then could load the page ok, but that's not working any more. Then I found another way around using IE (7.0.6000.16609) - again it wouldn't find the site the first time, but refreshing worked and once I'd loaded the page in IE I could then see it ok in Firefox.

But today nothing works on the new laptop, I've not been able to load the page at all. However, I can load it with no problem at all on my old laptop - it's working first time, I'm not even getting the 'page not found' error the first time I try.

I've tried pinging the site on the new laptop and it says:
'Ping request could not find host matthewgood.org. Please check the name and try again.'
I just tried pinging on the old laptop and got that message at first but then pinged again and it seemed to work ok.

Both laptops are connecting to the same wireless router which connects to Orange if that has any bearing on things.

Any help/ideas will be gratefully received as this is really frustrating.

thanks

Edited to add: I've just tried pinging again on the new laptop and it was ok (and much faster than the old laptop) and the site loads fine. But I need it to work all the time!

Conor_3

It seems quite a slow site. Is this one he's hosting on his computer?

SoozyJ22

I can't remember the details but I think there's a company in the USA who host it. It does get a lot of hits which may be part of the problem - it tends to work more often in the mornings here when it'll get less traffic (as he's in Canada and most visitors are from there). That still doesn't explain why I only have problems from home and more problems from this laptop than the old one.

fwor

I know it's suggesting the obvious and you've probably already done so, but have you selected the network connection on each laptop and confirmed that the default gateway and DNS settings are the same? It's possible that one has an old or incorrect address in there...

SoozyJ22

I'm not sure what you mean about the 'default gateway' fwor, but both laptops are set to obtain DNS server address automatically.

Don't worry about suggesting the obvious. As I said in my OP I don't really know how this DNS stuff works so it could well be something obvious.

Belnahua

Sometimes the DNS resides on the home router, and not straight to Orange's servers.

Check with Orange as to what their DNS servers IP Addresses actually are and try putting that in the network card IP's settings.

I always compare DNS to the telephone directory, it takes names and looks up the number!

fwor

Ignore the "default gateway" bit - if your network card is getting its IP address automatically via DHCP, it will get the default gateway automatically as well.

If it's set wrong (i.e. manually) then you won't get out onto the internet at all, so it was a pretty irrelevant thing for me to mention!

SoozyJ22

Thanks Belnahua. I've just logged onto the router and found the DNS settings:

DNS Relay Selection: Use Auto Discovered DNS Server Only
Preferred DNS Server: 139.175.55.224
Alternate DNS Server: blank

Does that look ok? My Dad set the router up for me when I first got it a few years ago, so I'm not sure what he based it on.

SoozyJ22

Oooh I've just looked on the Orange website and they have some other DNS addresses listed so I'll try using one of those instead.

Belnahua

I don't know how accurate this is (as orange's website is rubbish!) but try :-

Orange
DNS Servers:-
195.92.195.94
195.92.195.95

DatabaseError

ignore the orange dns servers, use those from opendns
208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220