I have been having a problem on my Ubuntu desktop with the wireless connection. I am now running Ubuntu 10.04, but the problem showed up immediately after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10. This machine is used as a CUPS server so my wife can print from her laptop and get to a printer downstairs. Intermittently, I will be unable to access the CUPS server web pages (or any other web pages on the local Apache server) from a remote machine on the internal network. I also cannot connect in via SSH. However, from the wireless desktop itself the web pages are still accessible and a local browser can also access remote web sites just fine. So, the network connection is still up.

To try to determine how often this was happening, I wrote a simple Bash script that checked if a page could be accessed on the web server on the wireless machine. I used wget to access a page and then log the results to a file while running the script from a crontab entry. It turns out that even though I cannot access a web page using a remote browser, I can access the same web pages using wget from a remote machine. This has me a little confused...

What could be causing this situation? I do not have a firewall running on the desktop with the wireless connection. After a while, the blockage of inbound web pages from a remote browser is "fixed" and I can again access the CUPS (and other) pages. Any help or ideas would be appreciated!

Many thanks. ---Jim

Is the web browser configure to use a proxy?
Are you using names or IP address?

The web browser does not use a proxy. The wireless machine is accessed only by its internal IP address (192.168.1.220).

One other thing I just discovered: I also wrote a simple PHP routine that uses an fopen to open the web page. It too works to access the file remotely. But - with a catch. It turns out that I can access the web page from my Linux box (which is where I originally ran the wget and PHP scripts), but the PHP script does NOT work when used on my XP desktop to access the wireless machine's web pages. And, it is the XP machine that I use to run the browser that also cannot access the wireless machine's web pages. So, it may not be an issue of browser versus wget, but instead why can the Linux (Ubuntu) machine access the wireless Ubuntu machine at times when the XP machine cannot?

Hope this is a good further clue... ---Jim