hombreman said:
I use IE 6 although I doubt that is the cause of the problem. I can get to
all web sites EXCEPT one:
www.firstalert.com . I friend on the same ISP gets
to it OK. I phoned my ISP and they could not figure out why. In Command
mode trying a Ping to that site times out. Doing a TRACERT shows all hops OK
until it tries firstalert. I have run 3 spyware removers and Norton A/V. No
blocks in the firewall and no cookies for this site. BTW the "Page cannot be
displayed" appears immediately for firstalert rather than the usual several
second delay for truly bad web sites. Any ideas? Thanks.
The only significant thing that you will be able to diagnose with ping
or tracert for that site is whether you are getting the correct IP address
for its lookup.
Better tool for that is nslookup
<example>
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: firstalert.com
Address: 206.17.0.13
Aliases:
www.firstalert.com
</example>
Notice that the name that you want to use is an alias.
Perhaps you would have more luck trying to use its canonical name
instead? Sometimes it seems a DNS will time out doing a lookup
for an alias but do the lookup for the canonical name more successfully.
I speculate that some DNS don't keep such information and have to do
secondary lookups which could account for a timeout symptom.
Both names worked fine for me and fiddlertool shows that the same name
is used on all subsequent requests. BTW the latter is often not the case
and in the case of an immediate redirect to the alias you would still have no
clue whether the problem was the lookup for the alias.
That's why tracing the request or trying to simulate it (e.g. using telnet 80)
would be helpful. Unfortunately in this case the simple simulation which
I usually try didn't work. That then could be a clue that the site is more
particular about how the requests it gets should be constructed.
E.g. usually I just give an HTTP server GET /
(That's: GET<space><slash><Enter>.)
Instead I had to give this one: GET / HTTP/1.1
And then that only resulted in a 302 redirect
to this error page:
<example>
Location: /index.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/index.aspx
</example>
which implies that the site wants at least HTTP 1.1 protocol
and apparently something else (e.g. perhaps a recognizable
User-Agent: string). Etc.
So, are you using HTTP 1.1? Check in Options, Advanced tab.
And is your User-Agent normal? Use the fiddlertool proxy tracer
or just go to this site to see your User-Agent:
http://www.fiddlertool.com/useragent.aspx
Note though that the most important thing is the lookup.
If you aren't getting a timely, correct lookup you might have
to add an entry for it in your HOSTS file. E.g., based on
my nslookup output above you would add this line to it
to override whatever your DNS is doing:
<example>
206.17.0.13
www.firstalert.com
</example>
HTH
Robert Aldwinckle
---
