Nothing on port 80, everything else ok

[Fatboy40]

burble,

I never thought of that one, that's a good test to prove port 80's fine

I can successfully 'telnet www.google.com 80', but still no web browsing on my laptop.

Something else I've now noticed is the same thing happens on a VMware Win XP virtual machine on my desktop PC. I've not changed any settings at all on the virtual machine.

WTF is going on ?

[b0redom]

So when you:

telnet www.google.com 80

you get a blank window, can you type

GET /

and see if you get HTML streaming back? If that works, then it must be a problem with your browser clients. Have you checked the network settings in them?

Firefox is:

Tools -> Options -> Network tab -> Settings

You need to have 'Direct connection to the Internet' assuming you're not going via a proxy/VPN.

[Fatboy40]

UPDATE...

Well, I can indeed telnet to port 80 on www.google.com, however, all I get is a flashing cursor and I can't type anything (this is the same on my desktop PC that is fine), eventualy it just drops back to the C:\ prompt.

FYI no proxy settings are used in any of my browsers (IE or FirefoxPortable).

This isn't the sort of problem where a noob has fiddled with settings and scrwed things up. The laptop with the problem is a fresh clean install of XP (with all SP's and Windows Updates applied).

Just to add a little more background to my situation I work in IT, specialising in infrastructure (Windows Servers, Exchange etc.) so all of the obvious things can be excluded from this problem.

I'm going to ask in some other forums just incase anyone else has ever seen this happen.

Ta

[burble]

The flashing cursor is normal when doing the telnet. As for not being able to type anything did you mean that whe you type the text isn't echoed back to the command prompt? Again, that's normal.

Do the telnet test again, and when you get the flashing cursor type 'GET /' and press enter - don't worry that you can't see what you're typing.

[Fatboy40]

Back at work now and tried it there just to see what happens.

Same as at home text is not being echoed back (but as you say that's normal), typed 'GET /' then pressed return ... I get nothing and it just goes back to the flashing cursor, I should expect to see HTML back in return ?.

[Fatboy40]

Just tried it with www.bbc.co.uk and got loads of HTML back, will try it with this site on the laptop when I get home

[Fatboy40]

Just tried it with www.bbc.co.uk and got loads of HTML back, will try it with this site on the laptop when I get home

Did the above on the laptop and got nothing in return, so traffic on port 80 is only outbound on my laptop

[TiG]

See thats really really odd.

As you've got the web connection up at that point. It should just return the information back down the same connection.

Its really wierd and i'm just wondering if you've got something odd set on the wireless. Port forwarding?.

TiG

[Fatboy40]

See thats really really odd.

As you've got the web connection up at that point. It should just return the information back down the same connection.

Its really wierd and i'm just wondering if you've got something odd set on the wireless. Port forwarding?.

TiG

Thank f**k for that, someone who agrees that this is a wierd freaky problem

Absolutely everything is setup as standard, no port forwarding, nothing, nada, zip

The freaky thing is that when I bring my Dell D620 laptop home from work it works everytime. Its just my damn home laptop and a virtual machine that do this.

[TiG]

Has the wireless router got a hardware reset pin on it?.
I mean i can't imagine its on the PC, it just doesnt' make sense to me. You just aren't getting any traffic back there.

I mean i'd probably put on ethereal to make sure with the connection and capture all the packets to see if anything was coming back but i doubt it is. But that should mean its only possible for it to be the wireless router.

TiG

[Fatboy40]

Downloading Ethereal now...

I'm not sure how it could be a router issue as it seems to be a problem exclusive to my laptop and virtual machine.

I'm going to bring home one of our loan Dell D5xx laptop tomorrow and see if that works, I'd bet money that it will, grrr !.

[TiG]

yeah but we're talking telnet not working, thats pretty damn fundemental.

How that can't be working i'm not sure.

Run the same test while tracing on ethereal and pm a e-mail and i'll get the trace off you if you'd like.

I want to get to the bottom of this as i love challenges like this

TiG

[b0redom]

Also, what virtualisation software are you running? I found that VMWare created virtual NICs which killed my VPN sessions. It could be that.

[xAmritx]

Are you using windows wireless software or you using the hardware manufacturers software when picking up a signal?

[Fatboy40]

Are you using windows wireless software or you using the hardware manufacturers software when picking up a signal?

Just the drivers for the hardware and then letting Windows deal with connecting etc. (I personaly don't trust the vendors own software).

[Fatboy40]

Run the same test while tracing on ethereal and pm a e-mail and i'll get the trace off you if you'd like.

I want to get to the bottom of this as i love challenges like this

TiG

Hi Tig,

Thanks for the kind offer

PM me your e-mail address and I'll send you three traces from Ethereal whilst performing the following...

tracert to bbc.co.uk
telnet www.bbc.co.uk 80
Browsing to www.google.co.uk in IE7 (ummm, just realised that I should have browsed to bbc.co.uk for consistancy, doh !).