[Novalug] can't get to www.google.com

James Tuttle jwtuttle@gmail.com
Mon May 7 19:09:49 EDT 2012


I have the same issue in hotels occasionally.

The solution is generally to flush your DNS cache.  On Ubuntu, you can
do this with:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

On other distros or if you have installed BIND or nscd, you might need
to restart them explicitly instead.

I believe this is due to some hotel internet systems sending you to
their captive portal page by spoofing the first DNS query you make, or
maybe spoofing *every* query you make until you log in (I've never
really checked).  They should set a TTL on these that are very short, a
matter of seconds, but sometimes they don't, and you end up with bogus
entries in your cache for a while afterwards.

-James


On 5/7/2012 6:53 PM, Nino Pereira wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have a weird problem. One hotel I stayed in recently had free wireless,
> but you had to check in to some hotel website first. My home page is google,
> but I was warned to first go to some other page, like www.cnn.com
> <http://www.cnn.com> or yahoo.com <http://yahoo.com>,
> to avoid being blocked.
> 
> Problem is, my portable computer is no longer able to go to
> www.google.com <http://www.google.com> in
> other places either, not at home nor at the hotel I\m now. I can go to
> news.google.com <http://news.google.com>,
> and from there to images.google.com <http://images.google.com>, but not
> to the search page.
> 
> Anyone have any idea what''s going on? Where do I look to find what blocks
> www.google.com <http://www.google.com>? Should I remove all cookies?
> check them?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Nino



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