unable to access UDB repository

[William Premerlani]

Team,

I realize this is off topic, but I have hit a brick wall, and unless I can get through it, I am going to have to give up UDB and go take up knitting instead.

The problem is that I cannot access either the UDB repository or my email from my computer. I am typing this from my wife's computer.

The background of the problem is that my old computer died a few months ago, I bought an HP p6-2021. Its a 64 bit machine running windows 7. It generally works great, but there was a problem from the very beginning. Sometimes I could not access my gmail or the UDB repository. Sometimes I could, sometimes not. I thought the problem was the internet, because the problem would come or go. Most of the time it worked just great, but sometimes not.

Yesterday the problem popped up again, and nothing I have tried, including rebooting a half dozen times, will fix it now.

It turns out to be a problem with my computer, the internet is fine, I just checked the internet with my wife's computer, an HP p6-2121, its running fine.

I have a simple test case that I use: I try to bring up the turtle repository browser. With my wife's computer, the browser initializes instantly. With my computer, the browser locks up. Also, I can access my gmail from my wife's computer, I cannot from my computer.

I am tempted to re-image my computer, but that would be a huge amount of work, and it might not cure my problem, so I thought I might try to figure it out first, with some help from my friends.

One difference between my computer and my wife's computer is that my computer has wireless capability. But I have that turned off and am using a direct connection to the router that serves both my computer and my wife's computer.

I tried turning off the firewall, that did not seem to make a difference.

If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful. I am at my wit's end (and I have a very long wit).

Best regards,

Bill

[William Premerlani]

Team,

Another clue I forgot to mention. My computer has no trouble accessing all of the other websites that I visit, performance is perfect. And all programs run fine. The only two areas of trouble are gmail and the UDB repository.

I have tried running gmail from all three browsers, (IE, Google Chrome, and FireFox), and none of them can get through.

I note that both of the trouble areas involve accessing the Google website, so I wonder if that is a clue.

Best regards,

Bill

[William Premerlani]

Team,

One more clue...actually, I am not able to access any email from my computer. I have three email accounts. gmail, yahoo, and nycap.rr.com.

I access nycap.rr.com using the microsoft livemail tool. I can receive incoming email with that one, but if I try to send anything, I get an error message that says the server disconnected.

I can sometimes get the yahoo account to work, sometimes not.

Best regards,

Bill

[John McClelland]

HI Bill

 

Happy New Year!  Hopefully you get this problem solved.

 

I don’t know if this is related to your problem, but I bought a new laptop with Win7 and had very strange internet problems too.  I was able to do everything with my old XP laptop, but the Win7 laptop would sometimes connect, sometimes not.  It turned out that it was the wireless router.  I had gotten a fancy new one that supported dual band N routing. 

 

After days of trying to chase this down, I gave up and bought a simple vanilla router and it all worked fine!  My daughter had the same problem and nobody from Dell or Linksys could help.

 

We now have fine internet….it was clearly something about Win7 and dual band n routers.

 

P.S. getting back to UDB dev after a long hiatus. 

 

Best,

John

 

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[William Premerlani]

Hi John,

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have two nearly identical computers on the same router. One works ok, one does not.

Also, I double checked, it turns out that both computers have the exact same wireless network card, and both computers have the card configured in exactly the same way.

It is very frustrating....I really am on the verge of throwing the computer into the river and taking up a new hobby.....

Best regards,

Bill

[Peter Hollands]

Bill,

I probably have the right background to be of some help.

If Skype is working, can you call me ?

Best wishes, Pete

[Claudio Carbone]

Hi William.
Computers can be substituted easily, passions not so much.

I've seen such problems spurring from all sorts of sources.most of them untraceable.

a couple suggestions:
-ping the problematic servers, what happens?
-do a tracert on the same servers, what happens?
-delete your hosts file, it's located in a windows system folder, do a search for "hosts windows 7" and you should easily fund more info

Regards and happy fiddling new year
Claudio
-- Sent from my LG Optimus 2x with K-9 Mail.

[William Premerlani]

All,

I have made quite a bit of progress in the meantime. Sorry for overreacting.

I began to suspect the cable that runs from the router to my office. So I disconnected it and used the wireless network that I have. Everything is up and running now!

Interestingly, I connected an old laptop to the internet cable in question, it was not able to connect to anything on the internet. My theory is that there is a problem with the cable, and that my newer computer can somehow manage to use it in some cases. Not sure why.

Another thing I tried along the way was switching the ports on the router that my wife and I use, the problem was not the router.

I am going up into the attic now and see if perhaps a rodent was chewing on the internet cable. We have had that sort of problem before with the TV cable that brings in our combined telephone, TV, and internet service.

Best regards,

Bill

[William Premerlani]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my plea for help.

And, of course, Claudio was right when he said, "Computers can be substituted easily, passions not so much".

I tracked the problem down to an open connection in the CAT5 cable that runs from my router to my office. What is interesting to me is that this cable has worked fine for the more than10 years since I had it installed by someone I hired to wire up my house for the internet. What happened is that one of the crimped connections in an RJ-45 plug opened up. There are several interesting aspects to this cautionary tale:

1. My new computer was able to access most of the internet sites that I visit, even with the open connection. How is that possible?

2. An old second-hand laptop computer that I recently purchased to take out to the flying field with me declared the connection to be dead.

3. The only applications that hung up all together were gmail and the Tortoise repository tool.

Anyway, I crimped on a new RJ-45 plug, and I am back in business for another 10 years. And now I know what to look for if the repository locks up on me again.

Let this be a lesson to us all.

Best regards, thanks to all, and a happy new year.

Bill Premerlani

[Florin Mingireanu]

Happy New Year to everyone!

Florin Mingireanu

--
Florin Mingireanu
Romanian Space Agency
Str. Mendeleev 21-25, et. 5, sector 1, 010362 Bucuresti, ROMANIA
office tel. +40-21-316.87.22; +40-21-316.87.23;
cell: +40-757-768971 (primary phone)
fax +40-21-312.88.04
florin.m...@rosa.ro
http://www.rosa.ro

[Claudio Carbone]

About how one computer was able to connect and another not: the cat5 cable has 4 twisted pairs, depending on the connection protocol just one or many of these twisted pairs are used.
Newer network cards can dynamically switch the pair they use to take advantage of lower noise levels, thus eventually overcoming a single broken connection.older or low cost network cards can't do that.

Now happy new year to all !

Claudio
-- Sent from my LG Optimus 2x with K-9 Mail.