Re: Intermittent connection problem while traveling

> The
> only thing that I could speculate was that her internet connection was
> "down." so YES, we could communicate with the router, but could not get
> to the Internet because she was not connected to the internet. Is this
> plausible? Is there a better explanation?

That's a plausible explanation, as long as you could actually ping the local
router.

Next time you're in a situation like that use the traceroute command
(tracert on windows). Using that command will let you see the IP addresses
(and DNS names) of hosts from you to the trace destination. It's handy to
use 'tracert www.google.com'

Look at the first few hops. If it's only getting to one or two, then try
some other DNS name. Perhaps using some country-specific hostname. It may
be your link to the router, the router's link to it's ISP or links upward
from there. The recent cable outages in Egypt and Asia are prime examples
of how traceroute could let you detect it. Although some hosts may not
respond to it, traceroute works often enough to be useful most of the time.

The other possibility is that open router was being used by LOTS of people.
A lot of users on it could cause trouble for it. It could run out of
available DHCP leases; but you probably wouldn't be able to ping if that
were the case. Use the 'ipconfig /all' command to see what sort of
addressing you got from the DHCP server. But even if the router and DHCP
server (they're often the same device on a small network) had enough
addresses it's possible that other users were consuming all of the available
sessions on the router. That's not something you can easily debug from your
end. It's something that usually has to be debugged on the router itself,
or from a wired workstation.

HTH.

-Bill Kearney