"Cannot find server" error - but ping to DNS works

[entaroadun]

Please excuse me if this is a simple question. I'm a newbie.

I'm an AT&T Broadband customer in the MA region. My house has multiple PC connections thru a Linksys router, but I don't have a home network set up.

Of the 3 PCs connected, one doesn't connect to the Internet thru IE. It is running Win98SE. Winipcfg shows everything is set up properly; the same DNS servers and gateway are displayed. Pinging all these entries on this PC is fine.

Trying to load Google gives me a "Cannot find server" error. Trying to ping

http://www.google.com

gets no response - the name cannot be resolved. I have hot-swapped the same ethernet connection to a different PC and can ping and tracert Google just fine.

I am using a USB adapter for the ethernet connection, and the driver (as well as the TCP/IP driver for this connection) all appear to be properly installed. I have removed the TCP/IP entries for the other connection (just Dial-Up).

Any ideas? Like I said, I'm a newbie to this stuff. Thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[manarth]

Hi entaroadun

Could be one of a few things.

1. DNS not working properly (can ping IP addresses but not domain names)
2. IP Routing not working - your IP configuration may not be setup properly
3. IE not setup properly.


1. try pinging 216.239.39.99 (google's IP address)...
if you can ping an IP address but not it's domain name, you have a DNS issue.

2. Compare your IP settings with one of your PCs (that works) - the only difference between the 2 should be the last part of the ip address (i.e. 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.3) - gateway, subnet mask, etc should all be the same.

2b. Check your router - does it MAC filter? (Check your router's user manual for info on) Is it dynamically assigning IPs? (i.e. DHCP enabled). Is it reserving IP addresses for a particular MAC? Is there a sufficient pool of IP addresses?

3. Check in IE, Tools, Internet Options, Connections...
You should have "Never Dial A Connection" selected...
Click the Lan Settings button; you should have "automatically detect settings" checked, the rest unchecked (unless you have an unusual setup, which you'd probably know about)



Hope this gets you going! Keep us posted on results / solutions.
<marc>