Hi,
First: why am I posting here instead of in networking? My old Zyxel modem (Prestige 642 ME) recently died and I replaced it with a Zyxel Prestige P623ME-T. With the 642, I had a very stable internet connection. Not so with the 623. That leads me to think that the problem is with the hardware and not the network.
(But, hey, I may be wrong...)
So here's the setup: I have two PCs, both running Ubuntu Intrepid and a laptop running Hardy. With the 623 modem connected, the chances are about 50% that the internet connection will be working at any given time. When it's not working and I click a link, Firefox displays a message bottom left that says "Looking up www.somesite.com" and after a while a Page Load Error is displayed.
What I usually do then is to access the modem via its web configurator, run through the setup wizard and a few seconds later the internet connection has been restored - for a short while. I'm sure that you understand that this is more than just a little irritating.
In experiencing and trying to solve this problem, I have observed the following:
1. The problem appeared to get worse when I enabled port forwarding in the modem. It would of course be easy enough to switch off the port forwarding but that's avoiding the problem, not solving it. And I actually want to use it.
2. The modem's diagnostic feature enables me to try to ping. When I try to ping
www.google.com it works perfectly and also displays google's ip address. The interesting thing is that when I then try to ping
www.google.com from a terminal, it replies "unknown host www.google.com" but when I use the google ip address, it works perfectly. Does this mean that there's a problem with DNA or NAT? (Or something else - I'm not very knowledgeable in this area
And that's the situation. I'd really appreciate it if someone could suggest a solution to this problem. If I need to post any more info, please let me know and I'll do it.
Cheers
Joe
