Confuzzled

[LavaGale]

ok this just blows me away, have never had this happen before.
Yesterday late afternoon, my son comes upstairs and says he can't get online. I'm on winmx, uploading and downloading just fine, but I can't browse or check my e-mail or open any messengers or anything else. I think ok, just need to reset everything and reboot and will fix the problem. Well it did'nt and I could not get winmx to connect, but I could enter all the rooms I had saved in favorites just fine. I could also download, and people could get a whois on me, but could not upload to me. I could get on FileTopia just fine and upload and download just fine, just blew my mind how I could still chat and stuff, but could not open a webpage, or check e-mail or anything else. All 3 pc's were like this all night. I called my isp support, they say things are just fine at thier end of course and that it must be my router, so of course I connect right to my modem and it still does the same thing, this was clearly not anything on my end. So then this afternoon, I try everything and it's just fine and dandy again
But what the heck was that??  Anyone know? 
I'm just confuzzled

[Bearded Blunder]

Sounds like you temporarily lost contact with your ISP's DNS servers to me, or something along those lines, winmx won't care once it's connected it's finished using DNS & search upload/download & even chat will work fine.

So would web pages if you'd tried to get there by IP address, but the request to your isp's server to tell your prowser or email what IP for example https://www.winmxgroup.com was not getting answered, so you'd see either an error or "page cannot be displayed"  if you'd known a website's IP you could probably got there by entering http://212.227.64.159/ & had the page display.

I'm not CERTAIN that's what happened, but it seems the most probable explanation to me.

[LavaGale]

thanks so much for the reply
am wondering is there a way to verify what my dns numbers are? or would I have to contact my isp to do that? I do periodically get dns errors in my event viewer, but never had anything like this happen before, but am beginning to wonder if it's related somehow.
Then I found out today that basically my isp sold out and I'm with someone else now, so could they have changed my dns without telling me?

[Bearded Blunder]

Usually DNS server addresses are sent by your ISP when you connect, along with your IP address however if you open a command prompt (dos window) and type in ipconfig/all
The resulting output will show your DNS servers and other useful information, somewhat like this:

Code: [Select]

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

        Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :
        Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC
        Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx
        DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
        Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
        IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.3
        Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
        Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.100
        DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.100
        DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 194.168.4.100
                                            194.168.8.100
        Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : 22 July 2006 01:45:13
        Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : 25 July 2006 01:45:13


[KM]

that will only show the DNS servers IP Addresses if you have already got the right ones configured (in which case you wouldn't need them)

check in your router and it should tell you the DNS servers it was given by your ISP when it connected somewhere (normally under some form of connection status page), failing that you can connect your computer directly to your modem, make sure it is set to use DHCP (ie set it to obtain an IP Address automatically - and set to DNS automatically as well) then once connected ipconfig /all should show it

[LavaGale]

thanks bunches guys
I wrote all that stuff down, good things to know for sure