Unanswered questions of mankind

[todd-uk]

Dear all,

This problem has baffled all "techies" I know - so if anyone can offer any ideas I would be grateful.

I had a wireless router & Access point intalled in my house so all members of the house can access the internet.

For some reason the connection refuses to allow me to connect to any Microsoft web pages or services. It is as if thee is something blocking all things MS? Does anyone haveany ideas or similar problem?

Thankyou for your time,
Tom

[nicentral]

What brand/model router are you using? You might want to try flashing the router with the most recent firmware. There have been issues with firewalls and long URLs, in particular Cisco PIX firewalls.

[todd-uk]

The Rouuter is a standard DSL Router (Asymmetric DSL Solution)?

The firmwre version is: ETHADSL_USB_032202_RELS
Showtime Firmware Version: 2.28b

Excuse my ignorance - but what is flashing? in the techie sense!

Tom

[todd-uk]

Also...............if I link to my Uiversity Citrix "Desktop Anywhere" - I can access anything through the Uni's Browser???

Tom

[nicentral]

Are you able to access the pages if you connect the ADSL modem directly to your computer?

[todd-uk]

Yes, If Iconnect via my ADLS modem I can connect anduse MSN as usual.

If I connect to wireess router via patch lead - I have the same response as wireless.

Thankyou for your help,
Tom

[zeroth]

when you are connected, what types of pages CAN you connect to?

[todd-uk]

When conected via wireless I can connect to ost pages except MS pages.

I cannot connect to eurobet.co.uk to place a wager on tomorrows grand national. I can conect to Abbey.com to carry out online banking and un.ac.uk to connect to University citrix.

I can also book flights from Easyjet.com - which uses asp. bbc s fine aswel. Jsp extnsions seem fine ?

Does that help?
Tom

[marinme]

The Rouuter is a standard DSL Router (Asymmetric DSL Solution)?

The firmwre version is: ETHADSL_USB_032202_RELS Showtime Firmware Version: 2.28b

Excuse my ignorance - but what is flashing? in the techie sense!

Tom

Well, google found one site with a listing of a router name 'Asymmetric DSL Solution'. http://www.wit.co.th/prod.htm

Do you have a model number for this router? or could you look through the website above and find it in there, or maybe even find the website for us(this option preferred)? As everyone else has pretty much said, it's probably a firewall issue of some sort.. since it works without the router, it's probably in the router.

Now to define flashing the router - it means to update the firmware within the router. In order to do this, you will need to find the manufacturer's website or another(probably non-official) website to get an upgraded firmware from.

Since I'm requesting info, I may as well request the rest that I may ask for:

1.) Operating System + Service Pack
2.) type of modem - brand name and model number
3.) firewall/security software on your pc

[zeroth]

I´m baffled as to what MS pages are as opposed to non-MS pages...

[todd-uk]

Thankyou for all your suggestions - after putting all your thoughts together I managed to track down a solution - but dn't understand what the problem was??

I changed the MTU to 1400 and it appears to be working fine. I can only assume the router was splitting the data packets too small??

Any cyber post-mortem theoreys would be interesting?

Thanksagain.
Todd

[nicentral]

MTU is the Maximum Transmission Unit. There are a lot of issues that MS has resolved with MTU sizes being too small with their products, primarily DNS on Windows server 2003. Something with long URLs being truncated. This was also an issue in PIX version 5.2 alongside Websense. Basically the URL was being broken.

Andy

[banGerprawN]

you are right about the urls being truncated. also a problem is the fairly lax security policy microsoft employs on all of their websites, even the ones without importance. a lot of modems that have their MTU set too high have problems with this.
if i could ask what the MTU was before you changed it?
it should not have been set any higher than 1492.
some people (out of laziness, stupidity or for other reasons unknown to my dog) set the MTU to 1500.
this not only slows down the connection speed of adsl substantially, a problem with packet-clipping ( i think thats what its called) also comes into play, where 8 parts of the next packet are sent upstream/brought downstream and discarded by your computer/your isp's computer because they are just assumed to be random packets as they have no link to the packet they are supposed to be with which is then sent afterwards without the first part of it, resulting in a resend that slows down your connection, and also screws with continuous handshake security.
thats not an incredibly good explanation, but hopefully you'll all understand enough to realise that 1500-bit MTU is bad, and it should not be done.