Expert: Dave Mitch - 1/15/2009

Question
QUESTION: Hello Dave,

I have had Comcast high speed cable internet for a few years now and have not had any problems until recently.  I can reach most websites but some will not load at all or will only partially load.  For example, allaboutjazz.com does not load at all.  I can reach forums.allaboutjazz.com but the images that point to allaboutjazz.com do not load.  Another example is opendns.com.  The text loads but the images do not.  I have tried different browsers (IE, Firefox and Opera) and all 3 computers on my home network but the problem is the same.  I ran tracert on both sites and it works fine.  I'm stumped.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks for taking the time to answer questions.

ANSWER: What are the results if you ping the two different sites ? If the results are different (one pinging and the other is not - you could try using a different DNS server such as OpenDNS)

What firewall are you running ? Are there any filters / exceptions defined on it ?



---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thanks for the reply.  Both sites ping fine.  I'm running Comodo firewall v3 with no filters or exceptions defined.

ANSWER: What is the situation when you put down (turn off) Comodo firewall ?

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: I turned off the firewall completely and there was no difference.  I even tried resetting my Linksys WCG200-CC gateway to the default settings and that didn't help either.

Answer
Have you tried changing your DNS settings ?

Try 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (nameservers of OpenDNS) as the preferred DNS resolvers in your system instead of the defaults presently used.

There is a tutorial on using OpenDNS at https://www.opendns.com/smb/start/