Randomly cannot connect to google sites

This open has begun baffling me, it happens to me at random times in very odd situations.

I cannot connect to google services (google.com, goo.gl, gmail.com, blogspot.com, etc) randomly from my opensuse laptop. From the command line, when this happens, I can ping the same service. If I attempt to download anything over HTTP from a google site it fails. This doesn’t just happen in firefox or chrome, but also when downloading a package from google or just doing a wget.

It only seems to impact google, though it kind of shows how dependent I am on google. When this does happen, if I reconnect to my wireless it works again. My wireless has two SSIDs, regular and guest access. The act of reconnecting seems to force a reload of DNS entries in the system.

I would first begin to suspect the underlying internet connection. However, I can run a guest OS on top of opensuse and it is able to connect fine, even when opensuse attempts to connect and fails. I verified that the proxy settings are cleared out.

Any ideas? Troubleshooting ideas maybe?

have you tried disabling IPv6?


palladium

Two more ideas: check your dns-settings (in case you customized them) and ask your provider about that (I had the same error once, most sites where fine, only a few ones refused being loaded although pinging them worked fine - the cause was a crashed server from my ISP).

This may not be related at all, but I could go everywhere but Google a few days ago. After deleting all google cookies the problem was gone.

On Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:26:01 +0000, gropiuskalle wrote:

> Two more ideas: check your dns-settings (in case you customized them)
> and ask your provider about that (I had the same error once, most sites
> where fine, only a few ones refused being loaded although pinging them
> worked fine - the cause was a crashed server from my ISP).

It sounds a lot to me like a DNS problem - I occasionally have problems
with my ISP’s DNS server connecting to all sorts of sites.

Thing I’d be inclined to try is opening a console and doing:

dig gmail.com

(or whatever site it is that’s having problems)

And see what the response is. With some setups, DNS performs ‘negative
caching’, ie, a ‘not found’ website is cached locally and the lookup
fails until the negative cache times out.

Jim


Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator

i’ll have to try the dig option next time it happens. i have a feeling that’s the cause, simply based on how it seems to happen and the fact that guest OS’s have no problem.

i can rule out provider issues - since it doesn’t happen in a VM that runs on here as well (even when the VM is running and able to connect to google, but the linux side cannot; and other machines on the network can also connect to google). i can also rule out cookie issues, firefox always runs private; all cookies cleared when browser exits; and the fact that a wget fails as well. i don’t have any custom DNS settings, so it’s not likely the problem. i’m really not sure what ipv6 has to do with this.