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Surfing Ethernet web connection lost, but email works!

Mac Desktop connected to Airport via Ethernet & DHCP fails to connect to the web but my email still works.

Symptoms:

On wake from sleep,(message may or may not appear: "Another machine is using this computer's IP address." Did not appear today with this incident.) Safari nor Firefox will connect to the internet, saying web server is not responding. However!

My email can still be received.

If I open Airport utility : unable to find any Airport wireless devices.

Fast User switching shows same symptoms.

Going into Network Utility, renewing IP addresses, it shows a received IP address from the Airport unit: 10.0.1.35, e.g.

Wireless laptop can make the connection. And Airport is visible from laptop and it shows my desktop is connected with a valid IP address.

A restart of the desktop usually reconnects the ethernet.

I can access a Cloud/DropBox folder from my Desktop.

The problem appears specifically related to browsing....


Something seems to be jammed up in the local Mac in the ethernet server. I changed DNS servers in the Desktop to 8.8.8.8 to be sure it wasn't the local DNS server giving me trouble...


Any help much Appreciated!

2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core & MacBook i7, Mac OS X (10.6.8), ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, 6 gigs RAM

Posted on Feb 15, 2012 5:39 AM

Reply
5 replies

Feb 15, 2012 8:42 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I'll have to wait till it happens again (rare!) to test this out. I have a couple of questions though. If it is a DNS problem, why would it be a problem on one computer and not another ? Because the other computer is not using the same DNS server? And the problem then is no in my computer per say, but something between my computer and the DNS server is cracked, and there is no way to do an internal flush to get it to work on my end?

Feb 15, 2012 9:07 AM in response to Jefferis Peterson

Your Router acts as your Agent as far as hiding your private IP Address from the Internet at large, but does not do DNS lookup on your behalf. Every computer does its own DNS lookup.


System Preferences > Network > Ethernet > ( Advanced ) > | DNS | ...


... shows exactly what DNS is being used, in what order on a Mac. The DNS lookup is done on a per computer basis, and every packet going out has a numeric destination IP Address already inserted.

Feb 15, 2012 11:17 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Yes, yes, I realize that and have reset DNS settings in Network prefs before. I was just trying to narrow down if / how the DNS server's communication with my Mac is so porked that I can't connect to the internet to surf but can get my email ? I didn't know if there might be something residual on the network / firewall / some other cache that would start spitting back this broken comm to the DNS server that I could correct on my computer. Changing DNS servers and restarting seems to be the only thing that works so far, but that is rather radical. What is ODD is that if I restart without changing DNS servers, the computer usually can connect to internet. So it seems that something in the computer connection itself is being reset by the restart...??

Surfing Ethernet web connection lost, but email works!

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