Yahoo.com intermittently unavail
 

OS: XP

Here's the deal.. about half the time I try to hit yahoo.com, mail.yahoo.com, sports.yahoo.com, or autos.yahoo.com (the only ones I am interested in) I get a 'server cannot be found' error.

I switched from IE6 to FireFox 0.8 to test and I get the same problem.

The big issue is, it only happens on my computer. Other computers in the house have no issues.

My original theory is that it's caused by the new version of Flash, because it only started happening after I installed the plugin. Of course I can't duplicate it on any other machine with the plugin, so I'm not really sure. I need more ideas.

Something funky in your Hosts file? Spyware?

this one is interesting, have you tried to do the ping router function? I really have no idea if this would help but you could see where its getting lost at.

It sounds like a DNS or a cached DNS issue. Are you using a proxy?

Clear out the cookies and cache, hopefully that should fix it.

This would be my first step.

that is illogical... because it gets the same result with 2 different browsers... one brand new

If you think it's a dns problem, drop down to a command line.

Then do an nslookup on www.yahoo.com. See if your dns servers are failing.

You can also do an ipconfig /flushdns, though just rebooting should have the same effect.

if this were the case, then other computers in the house (behind the same router) would have the same issue, but they don't

I still think something messed up your Hosts file, and there's a redirect happening through a server that can't handle the load. The Hosts file is used by all browsers, so switching to Firefox would show the same results.

Spyware Weekly's easy guide to fixing a hosts hack.

My computer used to do this with Yahoo. The other two computers on the network at our house DID NOT do it, either. And they are all running on the same DSL connection through a small hub.

I downloaded some drivers or something if I remember right and then it fixed it. Some "DSL tweaker" or some shit like that.

Two possibilities I can think of here...

You're not busy moving mungo amounts of data to/from another comp on your local network when this happens?

Otherwise check that your comp is querying the same DNS server as the other comps. Windows default is to ask the router for DNS but this can be overridden. Go to 'network and dial-up connection' properties and compare everything with that of a working comp's.

HTH

HOSTS was my first guess too. I can't imagine what else it might be...are you still having the problem??

If so maybe try doing IPCONFIG /ALL on the command line and seeing if anything is different compared to the other comps, especially the DNS parts.

This is a long shot too, but it may have something to do with Yahoo's page design, e.g. some code that they use on all their pages. It may not even be DNS or network related at all. I don't think it's this (but can't think of a better example...) but say for example if each of Yahoo's pages used some Java function that only worked with Microsoft VM and on only this box you had Sun Java installed, or something to do with Flash or another plugin like you said, that might cause errors...I'd be interested to know what the problem/solution was if you ever figure it out.


EDIT: maybe try getting a sniffer like Ethereal and watch what's actually going on in the session?? e.g. is DNS broke, or is the page coming down then giving a bogus error? that may help too!