techFriday, March 17, 2006
Windows XP's "DNS Client" service is a POS
I've been having this problem with my laptop for quite some time now. I'd had it for a few weeks before I'd noticed the problem, so it may have been caused by a windows update or something.
Every time the computer goes into hibernation and back out and perhaps when it's been on for quite a while (overnight) without hibernating, the stupid internet connection stops working.
At first I thought it was related to my wireless network card because that's what I was using when it first happened, but now I'm not sure that the wireless card has anything to do with it.
The quick solution (and the only thing that seemed to work) was to reboot the machine. There was no problem with the internet connection itself - the wireless icon in the system tray shows a good connection and activity, whenever trying to access a web page, it would show a small amount of traffic, but the browser would fail to find the page. Renewing the connection obviously did no good. I thought that it might be some bug with Zone Alarm whereby it wouldn't let any traffic through. Disabling Zone Alarm did no good. I could access other computers on the network as well as the wireless router configuration - but getting out into the wild proved impossible without reboot.
Just now, I soved it. It was obviously some problem with windows itself, not the browser, not the firewall, etc. So I opened up the Services section of the Computer Management tool and started restarting internet related services one by one. I pretty much started at the top of the list and began working my way down with every service that has anything to do with internet. I only had to restart two however - the first one is not important because it didn't do any good. The second one happened to be the DNS Client and I thought "yeah, if it's anything it's probably this. I didn't know any popular web site IP's off the top of my head, so I hadn't tried connecting to any IP directly, but it would explain why windows networking and accessing the router by IP address would work and nothing else (some other internet services would work as well, but now that I think of it, they also would have been using IPs rather than URLs). I restartd the service, switched to firefox which I'd already had open in the background, hit the home button, and the page loaded in about 0.3 seconds. A-Ha! it was the DNS client. I don't have to reboot to resolve this issue anymore. So then I cruised over to blogger.com and started writing this post.
Stupid Microsoft.
Every time the computer goes into hibernation and back out and perhaps when it's been on for quite a while (overnight) without hibernating, the stupid internet connection stops working.
At first I thought it was related to my wireless network card because that's what I was using when it first happened, but now I'm not sure that the wireless card has anything to do with it.
The quick solution (and the only thing that seemed to work) was to reboot the machine. There was no problem with the internet connection itself - the wireless icon in the system tray shows a good connection and activity, whenever trying to access a web page, it would show a small amount of traffic, but the browser would fail to find the page. Renewing the connection obviously did no good. I thought that it might be some bug with Zone Alarm whereby it wouldn't let any traffic through. Disabling Zone Alarm did no good. I could access other computers on the network as well as the wireless router configuration - but getting out into the wild proved impossible without reboot.
Just now, I soved it. It was obviously some problem with windows itself, not the browser, not the firewall, etc. So I opened up the Services section of the Computer Management tool and started restarting internet related services one by one. I pretty much started at the top of the list and began working my way down with every service that has anything to do with internet. I only had to restart two however - the first one is not important because it didn't do any good. The second one happened to be the DNS Client and I thought "yeah, if it's anything it's probably this. I didn't know any popular web site IP's off the top of my head, so I hadn't tried connecting to any IP directly, but it would explain why windows networking and accessing the router by IP address would work and nothing else (some other internet services would work as well, but now that I think of it, they also would have been using IPs rather than URLs). I restartd the service, switched to firefox which I'd already had open in the background, hit the home button, and the page loaded in about 0.3 seconds. A-Ha! it was the DNS client. I don't have to reboot to resolve this issue anymore. So then I cruised over to blogger.com and started writing this post.
Stupid Microsoft.
