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Dilly of a pickle......

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  • 12-11-2002 3:33pm
    #1
    seamus
    Registered Users Posts: 68,317 ✭✭✭✭


    OK, feel free to move this to MS Apps/OS if you think it's better there.....

    A friend of my mum's is from Canada and uses email to keep in touch with her friends/family over there because it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

    She's using eircom.net (shudder) to connect on 56K.

    One evening, all of the phone lines in her area went down. She thought she had an internet fault (reasonable enough, she was on the internet when they went down), and rang eircom.net support on her mobile at 74c/min. Since eircom and eircom.net don't communicate, they assumed it was a setup problem too. So, they tinker for a while, and nothing is solved. They make their excuses and hang up. She finds out then about the line fault, but whatever eircom.net support have done, her connection doesn't work anymore. She rings them again, and they tell her to go into Control Panel-->Network and 'Remove everything there' (FFS :mad: ). Then they attempt to guide her back through reinstalling TCP/IP, Dial-up Adapters, etc etc. Various error messages start spewing up, and they make their excuses again and hang up.

    Then she gets emailing a techie friend of a friend (using the local library comps) who gives her a list of things to do to try get it back up. No luck.

    She rings eircom.net, who dutifully inform her that her 'Ports are blocked' :rolleyes: and hang up.

    So I get called in. I go back to the start, reinstalling all the protocols and adapters, until all the error messages are resolved. Dial up, no joy. It's connecting fine, getting an ip from the server, and getting the addresses of the DNS servers. It's not getting any WINS addresses, but that shouldn't be an issue.

    Nothing can resolve domain names to IPs. Now, this isn't a massive problem in itself, because she doesn't surf the web, but only wants her email, so I could just get the IPs for the mail servers. But now nothing works. I can ping IPs, but when I enter an IP for the URL in IE, it attempts to resolve it, and then throws up a dns error when it can't. Ditto for OE and telnet. They keep trying to resolve the IPs as if they were text.

    So.....any ideas? This is Win98se btw. I told her that normally I would just do a fresh install when network probs arise in Win98 (Keeps it topnotch), but she's an older lady, and has hundreds of documents and memos scattered randomly over her HDD, so doing this would consume most of a day for me......

    I would install some other mail progs or browsers except that I can't download them onto her machine.....


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    #2
    Occidental
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,315 ✭✭✭Occidental


    A bit late, but have you tried using a non-Eircom DNS to see if it's a PC or an Eircom problem.


  • Options
    #3
    MiCr0
    Registered Users Posts: 6,265 ✭✭✭MiCr0


    yep
    looks like dns is b0rked


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    #4
    sirlinux
    Registered Users Posts: 651 ✭✭✭sirlinux


    id the machine has a network adaptor as well in it try puttign the eircom DNS servers into teh DNS setting on it, dont ask it just works, indigo DNS servers are more reliable try them 194.125.133.10 194.125.133.11


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    #5
    seamus
    Registered Users Posts: 68,317 ✭✭✭✭seamus


    Sorry, yeah, I've dialled up with Unison, got their DNS servers too, specified them explicity and tried reconnecting. Still no joy.

    I reckon a reinstall is the best way. Unfortunately it's a Dell, and they didn't forsee the possibility that someone would have to reinstall Windows, so didn't supply the CD :rolleyes:


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