Ever since we got a cable internet connection, every once in a while, internet applications stop being able to find the servers they are looking for -- Email and Internet Explorer, that is. The applications still run, but IE can't get to any sites, indicating that the network connection is down. The internet connection is still working, though, because I can use ping to contact various servers, but some service must have crashed somewhere, because I always have to restart when it happens. So I will do the following:
- Search the log files for something. I have no idea what. I just know there are such things as log files and that good techies know how to search them. That is one downside to the Windows XP annoyances book - it doesn't tell you anything about how to check log files
- Check which services are running that are associated with Internet Use
- Try locking in a few IP addresses: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. So that my browser can go to them without doing a DNS lookup. So, next time this happens, If I can still get to those sites and no other ones, I will know it is a DNS lookup problem. A Domain Naming System (DNS) is a server that an ISP runs to translate website addresses into IP addresses. Windows caches the ones you visit so it doesn't have to look them up every time you go back to the same site, but it clears the cache every time you shut down Windows. If your computer is not shut down very often, the cache can get full. Then your request must visit the nameserver anyway. Increasing the size of the DNS cache can prevent this. You can also hard code some IP addresses into your computer so that you skip the DNS lookup when you go to those servers. The WinXP annoyances book suggests hard coding the IP address for your email server this way to make fetching your messages faster.
10:08:06 PM 
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