Re: I am trying to resolve a problem with IE9 randomly giving 'IE cannot display the webpage' errors

[EricLaw]

This:

 

 '[Fiddler] DNS Lookup for "www.philstar.com" failed. The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found'. 

 

Means that the DNS record for www.philstar.com did not contain any IP Address records, which prevents IE (and Fiddler, and everything else) from connecting to that server because it doesn't know to what numeric address the request should be sent.

 

If you go to a command line and do nslookup www.philstar.com what does it say?

 

On Friday, June 15, 2012 2:21:40 AM UTC-7, Frank Kay wrote:

Through TechNet, I was introduced to Fiddler.  This has changed the 'IE cannot display the webpage' message to (for example) '[Fiddler] DNS Lookup for "www.philstar.com" failed. The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found'.  Can anyone tell me whether this points at a likely cause of the problem?

 

We moved offices in March this year, and now have a 10Mb leased line from a new ISP, the Windows Small Business Server 2008 which we have had in place for over 4 years, and a whole new set of PCs running 64-bit Windows 7 and IE9.  Our Netgear SRXN3205 router (as old as the server) has valid addresses for 2 DNS servers at our ISP.  The SBS 2008 server runs a DNS service, which has the ISP DNS server IP addresses, which resolve correctly, as its 'forwarders'.

 

The problem is random - general performance with web pages is great. No site can be relied on to fail with the ''IE cannot display the webpage' message. It may happen when IE9 is particularly busy (a user has 7 tabs on startup, and at times the BBC News website fails at startup).  I spent a couple of hours randomly browsing to provoke the Fiddler error shown above.

 

Our ISP (entanet.com) says that the performance of their line is solid and running at correct speeds, which I am prepared to believe - and I'm sure that they will assist if we can prove the problem to be with their network - but at this point, I have no solid information to hand to them.

 

Is it an IE9 problem? (I haven't tried any extended tests with other browsers), a Windows 7 64-bit thing? (as that's new ground for us), a DNS configuration thing? (we used to have the problem with our previous ISP at the previous office, but that was clouded by a combination of an old telephone exchange and a less-than-helpful ISP) - or something else?  We had no trouble up to, probably, a year ago, and have changed nothing in the setup of the Server or Router, other than the IP changes.

 

All contributions welcome!

[Robert Aldwinckle]

@ Frank

 

As Eric mentioned you should be using  nslookup  first.   However, another technique for dealing with flakey lookups is to use  ping -n 1 -w 1 to get them into the DNScache.    If you do that you will notice that the name that you are trying to use is an alias for your domain name, e.g. that name is seen in the reverse lookup which is done for the IP address the ping was given.   Hence, in order to get a complete lookup in the cache for IE to use you should also  ping -n 1 -w 1  philstar.com.   Also first use  ipconfig /flushdns  to simplify your analysis.   So, if you need to put it in a cmd file the complete script would be:

 

ipconfig  /flushdns

ping  -n 1  -w 1  www.philstar.com

ping  -n 1  -w 1  philstar.com

ipconfig  /displaydns

 

Do that last command just to find out if the first two worked but also to note how much time you would have to allow IE to get the benefit of it.   E.g. the Time To Live value is in seconds.   So, from what I can see you would have lots of time.   ;  )

 

All that would be a workaround for normal lookups which are somehow too slow for IE's liking.  However, I am wondering if you might be seeing something that happened to me the other day with  support.microsoft.com.   There was not even an  CNAME  record for it for several hours!   If that's the case for you with  www.philstar.com   your ping would say something like "non existent domain".   And in that case, we would have to find a better workaround, e.g. try to find a name server manually which the normal lookup was somehow missing.   I didn't think of trying that for my  support.microsoft.com  surprise.   ;  )

 

Finally, if the lookup is always bad but you know that the IP addresses never change, consider putting an override for (one of its addresses) in your HOSTS file.

 

On Friday, June 15, 2012 5:21:40 AM UTC-4, Frank Kay wrote:

I spent a couple of hours randomly browsing to provoke the Fiddler error shown above.

 

 

Ok.   One more thing.   Next time you do that make sure that you are doing  ipconfig  /flushdns   after each test.   E.g. if you ever got the actual  Host records cached you would be wasting your time for their TTL period.   And as far as trying to recreate the missing CNAME record case you would almost certainly be wasting your time without flushing the cache before each trial.

 

 

HTH

Robert Aldwinckle
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