The day Google stood still (on my WiFi network)

I just finished resolving (after 3+ hours) what may be the strangest, most incomprehensible computer problem I have ever dealt with.

The background: Will and I have a wireless router to share our internet. We both have laptops in our rooms. The wireless has worked without any major problems for weeks.

And then…

All of a sudden, Google stopped loading. And when I say Google, I don’t just mean search. I mean GMail, Froogle, image search, everything. The pages just timed out. Pings didn’t return, traceroutes just sat there.

That in and of itself wouldn’t be so strange, but:

1. All other pages loaded fine (and other protocols worked fine, too)
2. Plugging either computer into the ethernet jack caused Google to load fine, but it would stop working when going back onto the wireless
3. A third compy (my old laptop), which hadn’t been on the network in something like a week, was able to load Google with no problems

I tried everything - I checked the /etc/hosts files of all computers involved, I checked if the firewalls had mysteriously been turned on on both Will’s and my computer, I even did a hard reset (to factory settings) of the router. Nothing.

Based on a wild guess, I tried turning off WPA, and lo and behold, it started working! There is *no* reason (that I can think of) that this should have any effect on loading an individual page. Can you?

(PS, guess we’re now using WEP for our network…)

One Response to “The day Google stood still (on my WiFi network)”

JonW Says:
September 7th, 2007 at 11:10 am

Well, at least WEP is more linux-friendly

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