This has been going on for the past couple of months. I've been on Cable, DSL, dialup, whatever and never seen this before. There was nothing in particular that I can remember going on that might have caused this. By the way, I can ping and ftp from CLI currently as well as from GUI Network Utility, Transmit and Thoth (newsreader.)

#@$$@!!

BTW, I agree with you mT, that DNS should have a name associated with it's IP. Weird. Wonder where those addys are coming from.

Jim, lets get back to basics.
In IE you can go to http://www.yahoo.com
In Safari, you get a time out?
But you can ping www.yahoo.com?

Correct on all counts. I usually don't wait for Safari to time out, though. It just stalls "Contacting."

Can we associate an attempt to get to yahoo in Safari & some entries in your system.log?

No entries show up for either in the past few minutes.

Sorry, I'm stumped. There are a lot of ways to go from here. Reboot and trying another user, reinstalling the 10.2.6 combo patch, ad naseum.

Seems odd to me that your machine thinks it's hostname is localhost and you can still get out on the net.

I was afraid of that. Thanks for your help. I've got a growing suspicion that the dreaded clean install is looming in the near future! :(

do you have tcpdump installed? If not, you can install it via fink. Then run:

Then fire up safari and watch the output. That way you can at least see if any attempts are being made by safari.

Also, have you tried bypassing DNS entirely in safari and using
http://216.109.125.69/ directly?

J

isolate the DNS issue
 

Find out what the IP address is for www.yahoo.com (e.g. from the ping) and then try using that IP address instead of the name in Safari. This will cut out the DNS issue.

[edit] I see that JavaOSX has just suggested the same thing. But I note that when I do 'ping www.yahoo.com', I get: which shows us that yahoo is using Akamai and so doesn't have the same IP address for everyone. And I note that there have been some forum postings in the past about troubles accessing Akamai-hosted sites - to do with certain router's not handling very long DNS queries or something I recall.[/edit]

Re: isolate the DNS issue
 

Here's a list of IP's for yahoo, take your pick ;)

Thanks to all for your help. I'll keep the comments and try tcpdump next time this problem occurs. As for now, I restarted and the problem went away. But, like Arnold, it'll be back...

Jim

hmm, can we see your mtu? and any proxy definitions?

Here's what I got:
I don't think I've got any proxy definitions. Where do I look?

jim, [i] re-read the thread. you mentioned DMZ.

could you map your entire network architecture for us? ISP to your LAN and each device/host and the config'd roles of each.

It looks to me like from your ifconfig you have two ethernet interfaces up and running. what does ifconfig -a show for the addressess? two interfaces on the same logical network but on different physical networks would cause the sporadic problems you see. It woould be hellpful to also see;

"netstat -rn" because this tells you the default route to take if the destination address is not on the local network.

so do:

ifconfig -a and netstat -rn

on my system it looks like this:

estination Gateway Flags Refs Use Netif Expire
default 192.168.1.1 UGSc 22 6 en0

the 192.168.1.1 is the router and I only have 1 interface running.

Here's the full listing of what I get:There are currently three additional systems on the local network with me.

your interface and routing table looks fine, so u will need to look elsewhere.

Please be sure anothe rmachine hasn't "captured" your IP address; i.e. another machine has the same address or DHCP is serving this up to another machine. It would do this only if the DHCP server had the address in its range to serve up and someone also hardcoded it, too (granted, a long shot). No two machines can have the same IP address on the same LAN.

So when it happens, again, check the other machines. normally, you can "look" from your machine via arp -a to see if another ethernet address also has your IP address.

once the local lan is "cleared" then the issue is routing and NAT or the firewall.

I don't know what router u have, but since you are on the "inside" the router must be told to forward incoming packets to you (there is usually a DMZ setting).

I haven't used the firewall, but it's possible to deactivate some rules but the FW may still filter and you must totally unload the firewall module.

If the other machines are fine then it's unlikely the router and must be local to your machine (or dup IP) and I would lean towards the firewall if you have been using it.

see man ipfw.

network problems are tough to debug via email... ;)

Thanks for the help. I'll check when this happens again.

I've disabled the local firewall for now and am depending on the router's firewall for protection. Merve suggested that as well. (Thanks)

The IP addresses are, for the most part, pre-assigned with a specific range served dynamically for "guests."

Now I wait... :)

I have been having this SAME PROBLEM, pretty much. Safari, after a while, stops connecting to web sites. IE still works. I can ping, tracert, etc, from Terminal, and I can see other machines on the network. FTP, mail are AOK.

Safari CAN access my router's webpage.

Jim-

I realized you and I have similar routers (I have the SMC 7004VWBR wireless). I downloaded and installed the firware upgrade, then did a hard reset and reentered my data. Now Safari works without rebooting! I'm crossing my fingers, but in the meantime you might want to give it a try.