Poorly maintained ISP

locomotiveman

I am a federal employee who lives in government housing (NPS). Due to this there are certain benefits that I receive and certain issues that come up. The main issue is that there is only one ISP that I can do business with at this location. For whatever reason on a regular basis it is impossible to use the vast majority of the internet including but not limited to, yahoo, facebook, MY BANK, gmail, most news outlets, etc. The one thing that these all have in common is that they of course all have log-ins that are not run on an open source system. They seem to be blocked, I get a "page load error" whenever I attempt to access said sites. Does anyone know of what could be causing this on our end rather then the ISP's end? Obviously if its a setting for my computer it would be easier to deal with.

Thank you all in advance.

DanMach

Well, next time you notice you can't get to those run these commands and record the results: nslookup BANKSITE.com tracert BANKSITE.com ping BANKSITE.com

Nslookup will tell you if your DNS(Name -> IP address convertor) is working right. If it is, you should get an IP back. If you get an IP back, then tracert to the banksite.com again.. record that. Eventually it should just stop returning results(but not at the banksite.com's ip address). Tracert is important as it will determine where in the ISP it is dieing. If its dieing out of your ISP's cloud, then its not the ISP really. Finally, ping just tells you if you can even talk to the bank at all.

After you determine the issue, record time and date a few times and then submit it to your ISP. Hopefully they can get it to work.. if not, try and find a proxy that you can always connect to, and go through the proxy to get to the internet when those sites are down.

exoplasm

Or just head on over to www.opendns.com and use their servers for DNS (you can set this on your router or computer).

If that site is blocked, the addresses are:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

If those don't work you can also use:

4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3

This should fix the problem as it sounds like your ISP's DNS servers really suck (this is more common than you might think). It's unlikely that the open source/not open source thing has anything to do with it. In fact, how could you tell if they do or don't use open source login systems?

For instructions on setting your DNS servers: http://www.mediacollege.com/computer/network/dns.html