OS10.3.8 - Suddenly stopped resolving DNS's....

G

gedeckt8

Registered
Hi there -

Have had a rather odd problem start today. Am running OS 10.3.8 (Build 7U16) on a 1.25 GHz G4 with 768 MB RAM over a dialup line via the built-in modem. All of my saved network settings have been working fine ever since I got the computer nearly 2 years ago. In fact, it was working fine last night.

Today, however, the system does not seem to want to resolve any domain names. All that Safari, Mozilla, or Mail will do is sit there trying to look up a domain name and then give an error (eventually, at least with Mozilla) that the server cannot be found.

Have checked with my ISP and they tried dialing in using my account and the settings I am using, and my account with the ISP is fine and their DNS is up and running.

I am able to connect, authenticate, and get an IP address from my ISP and can see the router address, so I doubt it is a sudden modem problem. To confirm this, I booted the computer under OS 9.2.2 and used the same PPP and DNS settings to dial in, and everything works fine. (In fact, that is how I am online now to post this thread ! :-) So the modem and phone line appear to be fine, as I'm able to dial in and surf using OS 9.2.2.

In 10.3.8, if I give Safari or Mozilla an IP address to surf to, no problem - it goes there. But if I enter a name (e.g. http://www.apple.com) it just sits there.

I have repaired the permissions on my 10.3.8 disk and tried again, but no luck. Have also rebooted several times, also with no change. Have also checked to make sure that none of the proxies got turned on under Network Preferences, and none were. It's acting like something suddenly got corrupted that's now preventing the system from working properly with the DNS.

Has anyone else experienced this problem before and/or know of any proposed solutions, short of re-installing the OS ? Any advice that anyone has would be appreciated.

Thanks !
 
gedeckt8 said:
Hi there -

Have had a rather odd problem start today. Am running OS 10.3.8 (Build 7U16) on a 1.25 GHz G4 with 768 MB RAM over a dialup line via the built-in modem. All of my saved network settings have been working fine ever since I got the computer nearly 2 years ago. In fact, it was working fine last night.

Today, however, the system does not seem to want to resolve any domain names. All that Safari, Mozilla, or Mail will do is sit there trying to look up a domain name and then give an error (eventually, at least with Mozilla) that the server cannot be found.

Have checked with my ISP and they tried dialing in using my account and the settings I am using, and my account with the ISP is fine and their DNS is up and running.

I am able to connect, authenticate, and get an IP address from my ISP and can see the router address, so I doubt it is a sudden modem problem. To confirm this, I booted the computer under OS 9.2.2 and used the same PPP and DNS settings to dial in, and everything works fine. (In fact, that is how I am online now to post this thread ! :-) So the modem and phone line appear to be fine, as I'm able to dial in and surf using OS 9.2.2.

In 10.3.8, if I give Safari or Mozilla an IP address to surf to, no problem - it goes there. But if I enter a name (e.g. http://www.apple.com) it just sits there.

I have repaired the permissions on my 10.3.8 disk and tried again, but no luck. Have also rebooted several times, also with no change. Have also checked to make sure that none of the proxies got turned on under Network Preferences, and none were. It's acting like something suddenly got corrupted that's now preventing the system from working properly with the DNS.

Has anyone else experienced this problem before and/or know of any proposed solutions, short of re-installing the OS ? Any advice that anyone has would be appreciated.

Thanks !
Click to expand...

Have you tried "Reset Safari" from the Safari menu?

Failing that you could try trashing the com.apple.Safari.plist file in home/Library/Preferences then restarting Safari. That cures most things.
 
Hi and thanks for the suggestion.

I had tried resetting Safari before to no avail. I did try deleting that com.apple.safari... file (it was actually in \Preferences\) but no luck there either. I think whatever this is is a system-level problem since it affects anything that tries to resolve a domain name - Safari, Mail, Mozilla, my FTP client, etc etc.

Any other thoughts ?
 
yes, I was thinking about this today and talking to someone who knows a lot more about networking than i do.

Surely it's not the browser's job to resolve the DNS? Isn't this done by the ISP's DNS?

So is there some reason why your computer isn't accessing the DNS?

In the network panel of system prefs, under the TCP/IP tab there is an option box to configure DNS addresses. If you've configured IPv4 using PPP this box is optional however if you have configured it manually I believe you have to specify the DNS addresses.

It might be worth getting the DNS settings from your ISP and putting these in if you haven't done so, even using PPP. I had a similar problem with an ISP when i was running system 9 and I solved it by inserting the DNS addresses even though they were supposed to be unnnecessary.
 
Hello again -

My ISP was my first stop on this problem since I thought their DNS server(s) had gone down. But they assured me that they were fine and I double checked the IP addresses of the DNS servers that I had specified in my Network Preferences (per their setup info, DNS server info is manually input) and they matched. Note that using these same DNS settings I can get the computer to go online just fine if I boot it under OS 9.2.2. Everything works great there. The problem has got to be with 10.3.8 - something in the OS is preventing communication with the DNS. I can see traffic on the "send/receive" bars on Internet Connect, so something is happening. Note also that if I manually enter an IP address into Safari or Mozilla, things work fine.

I applied the 10.3.9 patch last night and it did not solve the problem - think I'm going to have to reinstall the OS and start over unless anyone has any other ideas.
 
Sometimes a reinstall is the only way to go.

One of UNIX's strengths is also a weakness; a system will continue working normally with several critical files missing, until you need them. I had a similar problem after recovering my system from massive damage caused by the 10.4.4 update. I got the system up and running again by copying the libraries from an earlier installation because 10.4.4 wouldn't allow me to do an archive & reinstall. i used it for another six weeks before discovering that I could access my iBook from my iMac, but not the other way around. Obviously something had got lost in the recovery process but it didn't make any difference to the day to day functioning.

I got my system working again by reinstalling a fresh OS on an external firewire drive, copying my Home folder onto the new installation, installing all the updates up to the one which did the damage, then using Super Duper's smart update function to overwrite the old system. This preserved all my third party apps and shareware as well.

Have you tried PM'ing someone? Nixgeek seems pretty clued up on nnetwork issues.

I know from the guitar forums I frequent that it's sometimes just a matter of luck whether someone with the knowledge sees your thread or not...
 
The inability to resolve names was a fairly common problem under some versions of 10.3. Some people report success by disabling IPv6 in the Network pane of the System Preferences.

Also, I believe an update to 10.3.9 wouldn't hurt, unless there's something holding you back to 10.2.8.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. I did try the 10.3.9 upgrade and when that did not help, I began to try other things, like creating a new user, new location, etc. No luck.

I picked up another hard drive this morning (had been meaning to anyway) and did a "virgin" install from CD of 10.3. After booting from the clean disk, I keyed in the dialup settings and DNS config...and it still did not work ! Something was really up now ! Disconnected my main drive so that only the clean drive remained and rebooted. No dice. How could it have been a corruption of my 10.3.8 if it would not work from a clean boot ????

Next I tried using a few other DNS addresses that I found out about - still no luck ! It was looking like either a weird hardware fault, or something external was wrong.

In frustration, I cleared all the DNS entries and search domains (they are labeled as "optional" in the Network Preferences panel) - and suddenly it was working again ! My ISP must have changed something in how they do DNS and 10.3 was no longer happy talking to it with a static DNS configuration. Am going to alert them to it, since the techie I spoke with on the phone at length last week was not aware of any issues.

Bottom line is that I'm back online with it again. Moral of the story is to beware static DNS settings with some dialup ISP's with 10.3 !

Thanks for all your help.
 
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