Hey, can someone who knows OS X better than me help themightyspazz out?

[camwyn]

The problem:

My computer's been acting strange lately. I can visit sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Yahoo, IMDb, and Google Maps just fine, but I can't load Dreamwidth, LJ is really slow to load, and I can't log into AIM at all - whenever I do it's stuck in a perpetual loading limbo. I couldn't access DW or AIM support since, big surprise, I can't access their webpages, so turning to you seemed to be the next logical step. Any idea what the heck's going on with this thing and how I can fix it? We've been having some really windy weather lately, but I don't think that's a contributing factor - I doubt severe weather would be that selective.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Further information:

I'm actually on OS X 10.6.8, so I can't actually use CCleaner or pull up the command prompt like you said. I did try nuking the cache and cookies via Firefox's "Clear Recent History" tool, but that did jack, apparently. Chrome's the same in regards to pickyness - it loads YouTube and Wikipedia just fine, but it refuses to load DreamWidth - it's always a timeout error on FF, for what it's worth (I suspect it's the same with Chrome, but I just get the generic "Oops, we couldn't connect you here" error message).

After trying the nameserver fix suggested at http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=265955 this occurred:

The nameservers fix just flat-out breaks Firefox and Chrome. I don't even get a server timeout or error screen, any pages I try to open are just stuck in loading limbo until I delete the nameservers. Opening up a new account and trying it on that didn't help, either.

Does anyone who knows OS X have any suggestions or knowledge of this issue?

Comments

[leeshajoy]

Is he sure it's a problem with the computer and not a local DNS issue? That would be my first thought.

[camwyn]

No clue, honestly. I'll check.

[leeshajoy]

He's at college, right? Have him go to a computer lab and see if he can get to those sites from there. Or, hell, just try someone else's computer in the dorm.

[mephron]

Along the same lines, it might help to go into Terminal and traceroute to see where thing are going.

traceroute www.dreamwidth.org will show if there are breaks and/or problems in the routing, which would give a good idea as to a problem.

[camwyn]

This is what he reports:

A traceroute resulted in this:

traceroute to dreamwidth.org (69.174.244.50), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 128.120.199.254 (128.120.199.254) 2.117 ms 1.087 ms 1.198 ms
2 ucd-adf12--border-dav-cmp (192.82.111.74) 1.418 ms 1.805 ms 1.887 ms
3 * * *
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
13 * * *
14 * * *

After that I gave up on waiting.

[mephron]

Looks like it's breaking at the firewall/front-line router. That means admins need to be spoken to, college IT group.

[camwyn]

Mm'kay, thanks. I'll pass that along.

[themightyspazz]

Emailed the tech guys. The computers in the lab work fine, in the meantime.

[themightyspazz]

Scratch that. ResNet unborked itself.