Jade's weblog Archive

My PowerBook loses most network connectivity

On a Titanium PowerBook, running OS 10.3.2, on a wireless network. My network connection just died yesterday.

Anyway, it works fine over ethernet, but on the wireless network, only pinging seems to working, and nothing else.

jadeforrest: Can you think of any reason my Powerbook would lose the ability to do all network connectivity EXCEPT the ability to ping other servers (and be pinged as well). And only for the wireless connection -- ethernet is fine.
jadeforrest: I can ping, but no traceroute, http, ssh, imap, or smtp
markd2: do other machines on the wireless network work?
jadeforrest: yes
jadeforrest: It seems like if I'm able to ping, then it should be a software issue, right?
markd2: ping uses a lower level of TCP than the other protocols, so something somewhere isn't happy
markd2: (gee, that's real useful :-)
jadeforrest: I didn't know that, actually.
markd2: if I have weird networking stuff happen, I wave a dead chicken over it by changing my config, applying the change, the changing it back again
jadeforrest: I'll try that. :)
jadeforrest: I even have some thawing chicken I can wave over it!
markd2: at this consulting gig, sometimes their dhcp server (run on windows. sigh) just flakes out.
markd2: re-doing the config gets me a second try at a valid IP address
jadeforrest: I've renewed the DHCP lease, and it seems to renew pretty easily. And DNS is fine, I think, because I can ping mail.bread.com for example.
jadeforrest: Which is totally mystifying to me. I've never had a networking issue like that before.
markd2: anything interesting doing an ifconfig -a?
jadeforrest: I don't think so. I'll be back in a few minutes (it's downstairs)
jadeforrest: thanks!
cro: jadeforrest: It might be a path MTU issue. Ping packets are very small. Can you ping with larger packets?
*** cro has signed off (Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer))
jadeforrest: Hmmm, I wonder if cro is on to something.
jadeforrest: If I ping the laptop (from another computer) I can ping at 64 bytes, and get 100% of the packets, but when I do 92 bytes, I get about 89% packet loss (for 56 packets)
markd2: the other computer is coming over the wireless too?
jadeforrest: yes
markd2: I'm baffled
jadeforrest: me too