[mdlug] Web page loads only the first time through a

[David D. Favro]

On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:46:48 -0500, "R Kannan (RKANNAN)" <rkannan at ford.com> wrote:

> A collegue of mine is having a problem with his router which sounds 
> strange. When he connects the router (Belkin wireless/wired) to his 
> (AT&T) DSL modem, he can load the first URL that he type on his browser 
> but cannot access any subsequent URLs. This started happening when he 
> switched his DSL service (and modem) from MCI to AT&T.
> 
> If PC is directly connected to the modem (bypassing the router) 
> everthing works fine.

A little more information would be helpful -- a detailed error message.  It is possible that in fact it is not working at all, but the first URL is cached, etc., but there is no way to know from you description.  This is part of a very large problem with software these days, which is the desire of many developers to treat the users like they're all retarded -- but that's a different rant...

It is much easier to determine what is wrong by starting with an exact description of what is wrong rather than trying to "reverse engineer" the problem from a high-level set of symptoms.  E.g. no network interface is up, could not resolve the domain name, could not connect TCP to host, connected but no HTTP response, etc.  From your description, it's a little difficult to guess the problem, but I'd guess it's router mis-config rather than PC.

Actually, your description of the symptoms sounds to me like me like it is probably a superstitious imposition of perceived logic onto a somewhat chaotic set of data.  By that I mean, there aren't many (although there are a few) problems that _deterministically_ will access the first URL but not subsequent ones, but perhaps it _seems_ like that is the consistent behavior.  OTOH, there are many common problems that will cause it to work when connected to the modem but not the router.  Aside from router mis-config, you might be using a bad cable, wrong kind of cable, plugging it into the wrong port, etc.  Most ethernet cards have a "link" LED on the back -- does it light up when you plug in the cable?

Since you are posting to this list, I assume that your colleague is using Linux?  What distro?  What browser?  What URL?

I recommend using a browser that reports the error (very few still do this), or try running your browser from a command-line.  If that doesn't print it (and likely won't), access the web-site via "wget" rather than a GUI browser -- it should report the error.

To speed things up, you might want to start with something lower-level than accessing a WWW page via a GUI browser, e.g. report to us what is the output of "ifconfig -a" and what is the output of "ping google.com".

Best of luck,
-- David Favro