OT: AAAAARGH!

Fecking NTheLl. Connection worked fine about half an hour ago - web, email, newsgroups, MSN messenger all fine.

Now (as it frequently does), the web's just refusing to work. Email, news and MSN all still fine.

If I connect via dialup, everything works fine (bar newsgroups, but it seems they only work if I'm connected via NTL).

The NTL tech support guy said that his system shows my cable modem as working fine, so it's a configuration problem. I tell him that nothing has changed in the configuration of my PC since 10 minutes ago when it was all working fine, and everything works fine when on dialup, leaving something along the lines of their DNS servers to be the only culprit left.

The other day I phoned them up and they said that the lack of web was to do with potential problems concerning my cable modem not neccessarily connecting to the nearest available server or something, so they've previously admitted that, although the cable modem shows up as being connected fine, there could be a problem elsewhere that's not connected with my computer. The guy I phoned up today denied that this could be a problem, and insisted it was my configuration to blame, or the DNS servers within the router. I said I couldn't believe this, as it was working fine 10 minutes ago, combined with what the other support guy said yesterday, and the fact that I'd taken all the other variables out of the equation.

Anyway, I phoned up Belkin tech support, and despite pronouncing "router" like the power tool, and their menu system taking about 54.3619 years to get through, the girl on the phone was very helpful (accent implied an outsourced call centre, but this wasn't a problem at all - her English was pretty good and her instructions clear and helpful) and it solved the problem. And she was quite patient with me running up and down stairs and around the house (no portable phone) lots of times during the call as well.

Basically what solved it was resetting the router, then removing power from both router and cable modem, then re-powering cable modem first, waiting for it to settle, then powering up the router. Previously when I've had problems I've just turned the power off to the whole lot for 30 seconds (nice and easy, don't even need to bend over, my toe takes care of it) then turned it back on, which often hasn't been much good.

So, good job Belkin technical support, and I believe I may have been a bit unneccessarily arsey with the bloke from NTL!

Reply to
AstraVanMan
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I have a combined router/modem feeding four outlets. It's in the cellar and permanently powered.

Now this machine is an Acorn RPC and broadband always works fine on the RISC OS side - possibly because all the parameters have to be entered manually. However, it also has a PC card running Win95 - too slow for anything else ;-) I need it and IE 5.5 as RISC OS browsers don't have even reasonably up to date JavaScript etc, so can't access some of the facilities on some sites. And it does exactly the same, sometimes. Doesn't see the connection that I know is working fine. Doing a re-boot sometimes sorts it, but switching the router off and on always does.

I've got a second near identical machine in the workshop, and it behaves exactly the same.

Luckily, I've never needed a maker's help line. Just a mention of RISC OS would have most of them staring at the ceiling.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

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