April 26, 2004
eBay Blockage
My s.o. needs help with a technical problem on his home PC:
"I cannot open any eBay page on my Internet Explorer. This just started last night. I can open all other internet pages, just none related to eBay. Is there a virus that specifically prevents people from opening eBay pages? This is really frustrating, I have run virus and spyware checks and found nothing, but I cannot think of anything else that could prevent access to a certain domain. Please help."
Anybody got any ideas (besides, obviously, switching to a Mac)?
Posted by mhinrichs at April 26, 2004 06:59 PM
Matt, i've posted your question at ask.metafilter.com . That might yeild some results in a few hours.
ok. here is the specif link to your question on metafilter - http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/6812
A couple of ideas not on AskMe:
Does he run a popup blocker? Sometimes certain page titles can get on the blocker's list by accident.
Make sure to enable cookies and javascript for the eBay site.
Can he ping the ebay IP? If not, you may need to flush your router. Can he tracert ebay.com? It's possible a hub or router along the way from his IP to theirs is out.
Clear all your temp files,and cache make sure IE is set to check for new pages.
Use Spybot Search and Destroy to look for any nastyware - I actually use this plus one called Spyware blaster. They are both freeware.
Can he connect to other eBay sites like ebay.ca or ebay.co.uk? If not, it may have may have something to do with the akamai servers they're using. My guess is to prevent DOS attacks. Maybe making sure you have all Windows updates and that there is not a firewall issue.
OK - first try resetting the router and modem. If that doesn't help:
Have you maybe recently switched DSL providers or bought a new router? For instance if you've gone from a DHCP connection to using PPoE, then you may need to enter certain DNS addresses in the router. Or in the alternitive, if they are entered, your ISP could have switched them, so you'd need to change them to valid addresses. You may also have to make sure you have the latest router firmware - and if you have tweaked anything to try and gain speed - you may have to change it back. You may have a problem with packet-size (MTU). See if the router has a setting you can change. If it has, set it to 1460 bytes or less.
Finally - I recommend Firefox! For the tabbed browsing and speed alone it blows IE out of the water. And this type of thing really never happens with Firefox.
DJ and Charles - me and Christopher send our thanks for your help. Christopher is going to look through the options and try to figger this thing out ...
