"You are not connected to the internet" message

I'm a fairly new mac user. I've been usuing this Mac Book since March. I have problems with wireless connection. I will be online doing just fine and then all of a sudden I get a "you are not connected to the internet" screen. Sometimes restarting the browser works sometimes not. Sometimes I just have to come back later. I have called my ISP, att. They couldn't figure it out. The blamed it on the modem, a 2 wire (dual modem/router) about 6 years old. They sent me a new one. I just finished installing it and getting all my wireless stuff connected. If anything the problems seems even worse this afternoon after all that work! GRRR. I am so frustrated!! Also have an ipad and iphone but not probs with wifi on them. What can I do? It is so frustrating shopping online a finding just the right item only to "lose" your connection just before ordering. I use this as an example because it happens a lot when I am on amazon. But that is not the only site, all sites.

Same problem here. All other internet apps (Firefox, Eudora, ping) work fine, but Safari and Software Update say there is no connection. Repairing permissions DID NOT fix the problem. Rebooting does fix it...for a time. This is 10.6.8, so whatever it is, the update from 10.6.7 didn't address the issue.

Since just Apple apps are affected, this strongly points towards a bug in an internet daemon unique to Apple. That is, other apps that write their own services or use the kernel more directly work around the issue.

@kurt tappe i have this exact problem, and it is annoying me beyond belief, and there seems to be no what to fix it, but it only started to occur since i update to 5.1 and beyond

I am having the same problem. ARRGGG! The last faculty machine this happened to the only resolution was to rebuild it! I just got off the phone with tech support - they have NO CLUE what the issue is. I have performed the following steps in this order trying them with both my wireless and ethernet connections.

Restarted - Launced Safari - got the "you are not connecte to the internet" message.

Opened network preferences - Status: Connected with indication of currently active and an IP address, subnett Mask and router settings all in check and working:

Ran "network diagnotics: Network settings, ISP, wireless/ethernet status lights are all green, I get a red light/failed on Internet and Server

Comes back with message: "Network Diags cannot fix the current networking problems. Check with your internet service provider or net admin..blah, blah...blah:

Meanwhile I am looking at my Macbook pro, which is obviously connected fine as I am writing to you from it!

I Flushed cache, renewed DHCP - Nothing

Zapped PRAM, repaired disk permisstions - Nothing

Called Appled and ran through the following things:

- Deleted and recreated my wireless network settings

- Deleted the following preferences: com.apple.airport.preferences.plist; com.apple.network.identification.plist; networkinterfaces.plist and preferences.plist

- Booted in safe mode

I've got nothing! Now what????????

right, im going to clarify something for everybody.

this is not a networking issue, nor is it related to PRAM, plists or the price of fish

or anything else people come up with.

why? because the machine usually has a valid working IP and is connected and retrieving packets in all other applications whilst safari alone is reporting that it is "you are not connected to the internet".

this is a safari bug, that i believe has occured a long time ago.

for me, it became apparent and reared its head when i upgrade from 5.0.5 to 5.1.

so this in mind i reverted to safari version 5.0.5, reset safari for the sake of it.

after that and a few restarts, i reupgraded to 5.1.1 and since then (3 days ago) i havent seen the problem since.

doesnt mean it wont reoccur. but so far so good.

to install an older version of safari you'll find the regular installer will not work on 10.6.8, however it will on 10.6.7.

it simplly says the OS is no compatable, so you need to use an app call 'Pacifist', if your on 10.6.8.

once you've found this and got it open, mount the Safari 5.0.5 SL image, then click open package in pacifist

and select the safari installer package thats in the dmg you downloaded. once it opens, youll see the package (.pkg) in the list, right click and then select 'Install Default Location' then provided admin password, and it should install. if it indicateds theres duplicates of anyfiles, replace them all.

then restart, and try it out.

after this i then reupgraded to 5.1.1 via software update. if you think 5.0.5 works better then use that instead till a newer version of safari comes along.

hope it helps.

The same problem here since yesterday.

- I am running 10.7.2 and there was no update installed yesterday.

- The problem is intermittent. It comes and goes away on its own. No restart or repair permissions were needed.

sleep has been a problem - numerous problems, really - with Macs since there have been sleepable Macs. i never let my Macs sleep, but just let them shut off their monitors and maybe their hard drives when they're not in use.

my personal jury's still out on letting the hard drives sleep though because i've read the spinning down and spinning up will cause them to wear out faster than if they just spin all the time. i guess it's a matter of priorities: is it more important to you that you save energy, or that your drives last longer?

aha: i've just discovered another possible cause of this problem. i was getting the "not connected to the Internet" message (after repairing my permissions and restarting) when trying to download additional voices through the Speech prefs pane. i like to muck around with my network settings sometimes to see if i can make anything work better, so i went into the Network prefs pane to see how i had things set, and noticed that in Advanced... -> Proxies i had checked Auto Proxy Discovery (it sounded like a good thing). i supposed that might be confusing things a little, so i unchecked it, clicked Apply, and voilà! - i can now download my voices through the Speech prefs pane.

so there's something else to check.

for the record, i've set up a working IPv6 connection using tunnelbroker.net (i told you i like to muck with network settings 😉) and i initially thought that might have something to do with the problem, but it doesn't. disabling IPv6 (with Auto Proxy Discovery checked) didn't fix the problem and now that i've unchecked Auto Proxy Discovery, the problem is not occurring with my IPv6 connection active.

i hope this helps somebody.

cheers,

Ian

I've been having this problem an awful lot on two different machines using the latest version of Lion, so last night I did some serious digging around. What I found is that before the error message appeared, the machine was doing a lookup of a site that would only be accessible when connected to a VPN. This lookup failed, because I'd disconnected from the VPN, and seemed to trigger the error.

Further digging revealed that the site in question was in the Safari list of top sites. It would appear that either periodically, or under certain conditions, Safari checks that your Internet connection is up by doing a DNS lookup of one of the sites in the Top Sites list (either randomly or cycles through them, I'm not sure). If that fails, it assumes that your Internet connection is down.

This test has three major flaws:

1. If you're on on an office network, the odds are you're using a local-caching name server. Which means that getting a DNS lookup for a frequently used site will work even if your Internet link is down.

2. Many people move Apple laptops between home and work. Often, internal DNS for an office site is only available on the local network. So when you take the machine back home, sites you've been using all day don't resolve any more. If this is the case, you'll probably only see the error at home (unless you have a local domain at home too...)

3. If you use a VPN, some DNS lookups may work when you're connected and not when you aren't. In this case, the error will only happen when you're not connected to the VPN.

Anyway, the solution to the problem is to edit your top sites, and delete any that aren't resolvable from your present location (if you're not sure about any of them, the Lookup tool in the Network Utility will let you check). This seems to have cured the problem for me.