Ethernet Card doesn't connect to some sites!

[TheAceMan1]

Howdy All . . .

In my sons system (win98se) an ethernet card went bad. So in my emergency stock I found two new cards. One from [blue]SMC[/blue] the other [blue]LinkSys[/blue].

I found [blue]LinkSys[/blue] had problems connecting to some sites I tested (particularly tek-tips), so I switched to the [blue]SMC[/blue] and all was fine, no problems connecting at all.

[purple]Note: driver installations were smooth.[/purple]

Out of curiosity I switched back to [blue]LinkSys[/blue] hoping to find the problem and stumbled upon the following:
[ol][li]If I enter [blue][ignore]

http://www.tek-tips.com

[/ignore][/blue] in the address bar the card keeps trying to connect but eventually times out.[/li]
[li]If I enter [blue]tek-tips.com[/blue] in the address bar it connects without a hitch![/li][/ol]
I have 2 other [blue]LinkSys[/blue] cards (same model) and tested one of those with the same results.

[blue]Any Ideas anyone?[/blue]

See Ya! . . . . . .

 

[smah]

This is strictly a name resolution issue & shouldn't be related to the individual cards. I can only suspect that somehow the drivers installed are doing something strange to the name resolution settings (cache maybe) or DNS server settings. For example, open a dos prompt and ping tek-tips.com then ping www.tek-tips.com - On a normally functioning sytem, you'll see that they both resolve to the same IP address.

 

[TheAceMan1]

smah . . .

Thanks for the reply.

I agree with the driver issue an am currently checking if LinkSys can relate to this problem.

BTW: I'd previously tried pinging before my post origination and although both methods resolved to the same addresse there was alot of timing out . . .

Thanks again . . .

See Ya! . . . . . .

 

[smah]

The time out doesn't really mean anything in this case, it times out for me as well. This just means that the TT firewall system won't reply to pings. It's just an easy way to verify the DNS lookup address.

 

[PRPhx]

If you suspect a bad NIC, try this: ping 127.0.0.1 -t. The -t will force a ping until you press Control-C. See if you get a number of timeouts.