Why does dis/re-enable wireless card work?

[ToddAndMargo]

Hi All,

Windows XP.

Problem: I have several road warriors. When they get back
from their trailer parks or hotels, they can not browse
websites on their wireless at their homes or offices.

Symptom: both Firefox and IE can not resolve an address.
Ping and Nslookup can. If you copy and paste the IP
address from Ping or Nslookup into Firefox or IE,
both can open the IP's websites. Symptom happens with
or without the antivirus/firewall enabled.

Solution: go into the device manager and disable the
wireless card and re-enable it. Then, do a "repair"
on their network connection. (A repair by itself
does not work.)

Okay. Now I am confused. Why does this work?
And what am I actually doing to fix the thing?

Many thanks,
-T

 

[GTS]

It looks like what the repair is doing is updating the DNS addresses. To
confirm this, I suggest running ipconfig /all before and after doing the
repair and comparing the DNS settings.
I've seen this sort of problem sometimes after awaking from standby or
hibernate. Does a reboot resolve it without having to do the repair?

 

[ToddAndMargo]

It looks like what the repair is doing is updating the DNS addresses. To
confirm this, I suggest running ipconfig /all before and after doing the
repair and comparing the DNS settings.
I've seen this sort of problem sometimes after awaking from standby or
hibernate. Does a reboot resolve it without having to do the repair?

ipconfig /all does nothing new. Neither does reboot.

The symptom is that command line utilities (ping, nslookup)
can resolve but Windows programs (Firefox, IE) can not.

Jeff over on alt.internet.wireless, posited that:
ping and nslookup may be using the
resolver cache instead of doing a
new lookup. Run:
ipconfig /flushdns
and try ping etc. again.

Makes a lot of sense.

I am going to a customer with this problem this week.
I will try the flush before I use the device manager.

I wonder if this has anything to do with DNS Cache
being turned on. (I usually turn it off.)

-T

 

[GTS]

I didn't expect ipconfig /all to 'do anything new.' This command is an
information query. The point of the suggestion was for you to comare the
DNS info in the 2 runs to try to narrow the problem. It might or might not
shed some light on it.
Jeff's suggestion is a good one.
--

 

[ToddAndMargo]

I didn't expect ipconfig /all to 'do anything new.' This command is an
information query. The point of the suggestion was for you to comare the
DNS info in the 2 runs to try to narrow the problem. It might or might not
shed some light on it.
Jeff's suggestion is a good one.

Oops, I meant to say "ipconfig /release" and "ipconfig /renew",
then "ipconfig /all" did not do anything new.

The customer that had the problem this week delayed, so
I will have to wait a bit to try "/flushdns". I
have a strong feeling Jeff called it.

-T