I am hoping for some tips on how to troubleshoot my Internet connection, specifically to find out why some pages refuse to load and others refuse to load completely.

Several days ago I switched ISPs and ever since then I have been experiencing some problems with access to several web sites. For example, if I go to news.google.com, the page will load, but the page loading whirlygig indicator on the left side of the browser tab will continue to whirl. If I use firefox's google search box on the upper right of the browser window to do a search, all the status block at the bottom will show me is "waiting on www.google.de".

Here in linuxquestions.org I clicked the new thread button a little while back. Through all the time it has taken me to write this post so far, plus the time it took me to change my /etc/dhcpd.conf to reflect the new ISP's nameserver IP addresses and a quick trip into my daughter's room to check her nameserver settings, the whirlygig on the linuxquestions.org browser tab has been going round and round. At the bottom of the page, I see "Waiting for pagead2.googlesyndication.com..."

My daughter's school friend came in a couple of minutes ago to check a bus schedule on line. We entered her information at www.vrn.de and then we clicked on the button to get the schedule information. A new browser window opened that was supposed to load information from efa9.vrn.de, but the window remained blank. In the status bar, you guessed it, "Waiting for efa9.vrn.de..."

When I go to the home page of my online bank, I get redirected to the secure login page. But, there again, I get the "Waiting for..." message.

These are just several examples of the problem pages. It seems to me that they are varied enough so that the issue wouldn't be a single down server somewhere.

There is also a possibility that the equipment on my end is to blame. When I changed ISPs, I also changed routers. (I had to. My old router, a SuSE Linux box acting as router and firewall, died a noisy death.) The router I am using now is a Netgear RP614 Web Safe Router. The router logs into my ISP with a loginname and password, and the ISP uses that login to always provide me with the same IP address. I'm not sure how the router could affect only certain sites, though. I don't have any content filters set on it yet.

Can anyone provide me with some suggestions on how to isolate the problem? Is this something I should bring up with my ISP immediately?

Hmm, I think intermittent problems like this could be related to DNS servers. Have you specified your ISP's DNS servers in YaST or enabled DNS on your router. And can you ping these servers?

Yes, my first thought was DNS also. My router gets the DNS server IP addresses from the ISP on logon, and I used the admin tool it provides to get the server IP addresses and add them to my local resolv.conf and to my wife's and daughter's WinXP machines, as well as to the dhcpd.conf I have on my main linux box.

I read an article about httping the other day, and I have been using that to check the connectivity to the sites. Here is what I get for pagead2.googlesyndication.com:

bash-3.00$ httping -g http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com -s -c 5 -G -i 10 -r
PING pagead2.googlesyndication.com:80 (http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com):
connected to pagead2.googlesyndication.com:80, seq=0 time=149.26 ms 301 Moved Permanently
connected to pagead2.googlesyndication.com:80, seq=1 time=274.31 ms 301 Moved Permanently
connected to pagead2.googlesyndication.com:80, seq=2 time=149.05 ms 301 Moved Permanently
connected to pagead2.googlesyndication.com:80, seq=3 time=147.74 ms 301 Moved Permanently
connected to pagead2.googlesyndication.com:80, seq=4 time=151.39 ms 301 Moved Permanently
--- http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com ping statistics ---
5 connects, 5 ok, 0.00% failed
round-trip min/avg/max = 147.7/174.3/274.3 ms

pagead2.googlesyndication.com seems to be the problem I have been having with news.google.com and linuxquestions.org, so maybe I should rule that out as an ISP or router problem. But I am still having problems with the banking site (can't httping it because it is a secure site), and my wife an daughter report problems on sites they try to visit. The googlesyndication.com problem also doesn't explain the problem with the bus schedule site.

OK, looks like I may have fixed this. (Sound of me knocking on wood.)

The MTU size on the router was set to zero (0). I changed it to 1500 and hit apply. The router thought for a few seconds, then came back up with an MTU of 1492, which I understand from the Netgear support page is the setting PPPoE likes the best.

So anyway, looks like everything is OK now, at least I haven't run into any pages that won't load, and the ones I was having trouble with are fine now.