Calling Mike-W - ubuntu update - how about MTUs? ##EUREKA###

[kityuser]

OK, here's the latest.

Ubuntu loaded on Mac, situation with the 2 known problem sites persist, Natonwide and Just Giving. Nat West works fine.

Ubuntu 9.04 and Firefox for Ubuntu 3.0.8 canical 1.0


I guess this proves the problem is ISP/Router related but is not specific to all Https sites.

bright Ides welcomed.

Did not manage to speak to the ISP ref a new Router last night, missuswas late home then insisted on watching Emma and fell asleep before the end - that's a working woman for you!!
Bless her.

Cheers

Andy

ok so the way I see this is that it now looks like an ISP/router/config type issue.

Theres probably 1001 differences in DHCP config between windows and OSX/linux and I would bet a months wages that the router was only really checked/tested/debugged with windows :-(

so my betting is you may have to go the manual config route., i.e. not get an ethernet IP automatically from the router.

I used to run my system this way at home, can't really remember why I changed to DHCP throughout.
I used to run a hybrid system where address in the range 192.168.1.1 -> 100 were reserved and DHCP started at 101. that way DHCP machines still worked, and static IP machines also played nice. I`d suggest the same here, that way your wifes laptop will still work, but you can configure the mac manually.

I can't speak english any better than a few grunts so french is COMPLETELY out for me, sorry. If you ever have to speak to anyone on the phone remember 2 things
1) SLOW
2) LOUND

best way to deal with `dem foreigners

Steve

 

[RogerS]

OK, here's the latest.

Ubuntu loaded on Mac, situation with the 2 known problem sites persist, Natonwide and Just Giving. Nat West works fine.

Ubuntu 9.04 and Firefox for Ubuntu 3.0.8 canical 1.0


I guess this proves the problem is ISP/Router related but is not specific to all Https sites.

bright Ides welcomed.

Did not manage to speak to the ISP ref a new Router last night, missuswas late home then insisted on watching Emma and fell asleep before the end - that's a working woman for you!!
Bless her.

Cheers

Andy

Andy

Just to clarify, what this actually proves is a conflict between your Mac and ISP or router or both, not that you have a specific ISP/router issue!

As you say, your wifes lappy works fine, therefore the problem is with your Mac interfacing with the router/ISP!

I hate to keep harping back, but if this worked okay before you updated your software then surely this points to issues with the software and its compatibility with other devices???

But surely if Andy booted up and ran ubuntu then he's not using any part of his Mac OS X software? Which rules out the Mac?

 

[kityuser]

OK, here's the latest.

Ubuntu loaded on Mac, situation with the 2 known problem sites persist, Natonwide and Just Giving. Nat West works fine.

Ubuntu 9.04 and Firefox for Ubuntu 3.0.8 canical 1.0


I guess this proves the problem is ISP/Router related but is not specific to all Https sites.

bright Ides welcomed.

Did not manage to speak to the ISP ref a new Router last night, missuswas late home then insisted on watching Emma and fell asleep before the end - that's a working woman for you!!
Bless her.

Cheers

Andy

Andy

Just to clarify, what this actually proves is a conflict between your Mac and ISP or router or both, not that you have a specific ISP/router issue!

As you say, your wifes lappy works fine, therefore the problem is with your Mac interfacing with the router/ISP!

I hate to keep harping back, but if this worked okay before you updated your software then surely this points to issues with the software and its compatibility with other devices???

I`d agree up to "software and other devices"

router software........ I`d suspect as being "suspect".

surely its quite improbable that 2 different OS`s have the same (DNS?) configuration issue?

i'd suspect the router plays nice with M$ and Andy was lucky before with OSX.

:shock:

suspect DHCP type config issues with non M$ OS`s....... ??????

another + for Ubuntu 8) not the first time its got me out of trouble thats for sure!

Steve

 

[kityuser]

OK, here's the latest.

Ubuntu loaded on Mac, situation with the 2 known problem sites persist, Natonwide and Just Giving. Nat West works fine.

Ubuntu 9.04 and Firefox for Ubuntu 3.0.8 canical 1.0


I guess this proves the problem is ISP/Router related but is not specific to all Https sites.

bright Ides welcomed.

Did not manage to speak to the ISP ref a new Router last night, missuswas late home then insisted on watching Emma and fell asleep before the end - that's a working woman for you!!
Bless her.

Cheers

Andy

Andy

Just to clarify, what this actually proves is a conflict between your Mac and ISP or router or both, not that you have a specific ISP/router issue!

As you say, your wifes lappy works fine, therefore the problem is with your Mac interfacing with the router/ISP!

I hate to keep harping back, but if this worked okay before you updated your software then surely this points to issues with the software and its compatibility with other devices???

But surely if Andy booted up and ran ubuntu then he's not using any part of his Mac OS X software? Which rules out the Mac?

We`re all cross posting


agree 100%


Andy > there are literally 100s of forums/sites to help you configure the ubuntu livecd for manual IP/DNS resolution

Steve

 

[RogerS]

Scene 1 - Alice support centre

Pierre..."Ah 'av zis crazy Englishman on ze phone. He say 'e 'as plugged in ze Apple into ze router. Comment? Why are ze english so crazee, non? Ze apple eez for eating, n'est-ce-pas, Henri?"

Henri .."Bien sur, mon ami, bien sur. Un autre Calvados, Pierre?"

 

[dedee]

[
ok so the way I see this is that it now looks like an ISP/router/config type issue.

Theres probably 1001 differences in DHCP config between windows and OSX/linux and I would bet a months wages that the router was only really checked/tested/debugged with windows :-(

so my betting is you may have to go the manual config route., i.e. not get an ethernet IP automatically from the router.

I used to run my system this way at home, can't really remember why I changed to DHCP throughout.
I used to run a hybrid system where address in the range 192.168.1.1 -> 100 were reserved and DHCP started at 101. that way DHCP machines still worked, and static IP machines also played nice. I`d suggest the same here, that way your wifes laptop will still work, but you can configure the mac manually.

Steve

Steve, sorry, how to I configure an IP address manually.

Can we go down this route before I regress back to Safari 3 and Tiger?

Cheers

Andy

 

[RogerS]

Surely DHCP would affect access to the internet on all sites? His Mac IP address isn't going to change half way through a session, is it? Wonder if Alice is routing through a proxy somewhere or other? There have been instances of some UK ISP's routing outside the UK which means when the customer tries to access the BBC iPlayer it won't allow it as it thinks the user is outside the UK.

 

[kityuser]

Surely DHCP would affect access to the internet on all sites? His Mac IP address isn't going to change half way through a session, is it? Wonder if Alice is routing through a proxy somewhere or other? There have been instances of some UK ISP's routing outside the UK which means when the customer tries to access the BBC iPlayer it won't allow it as it thinks the user is outside the UK.

not 100% but do you have to be in the UK to access the nationwide website? don't think so whereas Iplayer specifically is only licensed for the UK and thats why its knobbled for outside UK access (which is easy to get around...).

Andy, you could swap back to Tiger and safari 3 :? and never know the problem

by DHCP, I quite wrongly mean all of the auto configuration from the router, DNS, IP, gateway

steve

 

[TrimTheKing]

But surely if Andy booted up and ran ubuntu then he's not using any part of his Mac OS X software? Which rules out the Mac?

I think it's quite obvious Roger, that I completely ignored (didn't even see ) the fact that he was now using ubuntu!

Completely agree with comments from both yourself and Steve.

Even though it's a French router there's no reason why an english one wouldn't work is there? Providing he put in the right passwords etc?

Not sure about the DHCP part as that is a networking protocol and thus non machine specific, but the way this is going it wouldn't surprise me...

 

[kityuser]

But surely if Andy booted up and ran ubuntu then he's not using any part of his Mac OS X software? Which rules out the Mac?

I think it's quite obvious Roger, that I completely ignored (didn't even see ) the fact that he was now using ubuntu!

Completely agree with comments from both yourself and Steve.

Even though it's a French router there's no reason why an english one wouldn't work is there? Providing he put in the right passwords etc?

Not sure about the DHCP part as that is a networking protocol and thus non machine specific, but the way this is going it wouldn't surprise me...

if it were me, I`d start to "go back to basics", manually assign an IP, configure the DNS by hand.... etc etc etc, start small and build up.

it would seem all this nice auto-config from a router is all well-and-good when it all works :?

its worth pointing out that auto config for a mac or indeed any other client consists of a considerable amount of code in the OS. Problem with standards (like DHCP protocol) is that people take short cuts and don't always stick to what they are supposed to implement.

lets face it, if you or I were designing a router, we'd probably get it working with windows first being 99% of the customers. Question is how much incentive is there to go back and check it against OSX or any other client OS?

could be barking up the wrong tree.....
for example it could be a real whacky NAT problem or a nasty firewall configuration problem (although the mac address of the imac netcard shouldn't have changed.)


I`d boot back into 10.5, assign a manual IP (gateway, subnet et al), disable IPV6, proxies and firewall on mac and router, disable DHCP on the router, configure opendns and try again.......

Steve

 

[RogerS]

Sorry...my bad grammar confused things. Ignore reference to iPlayer.

Here's my take on networking 101 (but expect to be shot down).

Andy turns his Mac on, Mac asks router (using DHCP) for an IP address. This will be in the range (usually) 192.168.1.xx (192.168.0.xx). Unless Andy invokes the equivalent of an IPCONFIG /release command then that IP address is going to stay fixed. Even during access to Nationwide. So rule out anything to do with DHCP as if that didn't work, Andy wouldn't be able to access the internet at all.

Andy then sticks in the URL for Nationwide. At this point, either his local DNS cache in the Mac, in the router(?) or at his ISP (Alice) will work convert www.natiowide..etc into the appropriate IP address. During the session, he may get rerouted to a different server (therefore different IP address?) but once he's got to the server, where the HTTPS transaction he is trying to carry out is actually processed, then at that point DNS goes out of the picture.

So now we have a secure channel using one-way SSL (I'd guess ..although Andy did mention a card which suggests two-way SSL....but maybe that was another post in another thread far far away...) whatever...he has established a secure link between his Mac and their server. As far as I know, once the authentication has been carried out at the SSL level then it's not continuously re-authenticated (?) during the lifetime of the transaction.

The transaction itself (using port 443) consists of packets of data going back and forth between the Mac and their server. It's here that it goes pear-shaped and I think that the router, for whatever reason, is losing its' internal reference pointers that tell it to route data coming in on port 443 to be passed to local IP address 192.168.1.xx (ie Andy's Mac).

But that doesn't explain why a Microsoft laptop works OK and so all that I have just written could be bollocks. A little knowledge and all that.

 

[RogerS]

.......
could be barking up the wrong tree.....
for example it could be a real whacky NAT problem or a nasty firewall configuration problem (although the mac address of the imac netcard shouldn't have changed.)
......

Snap!

 

[TrimTheKing]

if it were me, I`d start to "go back to basics", manually assign an IP, configure the DNS by hand.... etc etc etc, start small and build up.

Absolutely agree.

it would seem all this nice auto-config from a router is all well-and-good when it all works :?

its worth pointing out that auto config for a mac or indeed any other client consists of a considerable amount of code in the OS. Problem with standards (like DHCP protocol) is that people take short cuts and don't always stick to what they are supposed to implement.

Absolutely, though the fields in the RFC for DHCP are very specific and there's not a huge amount of wiggle room in them where there is in other RFC's. That doesn't mean something isn't wrong, but DHCP doesn't leave a lot for 'interpretation'.

lets face it, if you or I were designing a router, we'd probably get it working with windows first being 99% of the customers. Question is how much incentive is there to go back and check it against OSX or any other client OS?

Yup

could be barking up the wrong tree.....
for example it could be a real whacky NAT problem or a nasty firewall configuration problem (although the mac address of the imac netcard shouldn't have changed.)

Was wondering, after a chat with my senior techy here, whether there could be something different about the way a Mac IP stack is set up, or maybe gone whacky on this machine...

I`d boot back into 10.5, assign a manual IP (gateway, subnet et al), disable IPV6, proxies and firewall on mac and router, disable DHCP on the router, configure opendns and try again.......

Yup, agree

 

[kityuser]

Sorry...my bad grammar confused things. Ignore reference to iPlayer.

Here's my take on networking 101 (but expect to be shot down).

Andy turns his Mac on, Mac asks router (using DHCP) for an IP address. This will be in the range (usually) 192.168.1.xx (192.168.0.xx). Unless Andy invokes the equivalent of an IPCONFIG /release command then that IP address is going to stay fixed. Even during access to Nationwide. So rule out anything to do with DHCP as if that didn't work, Andy wouldn't be able to access the internet at all.

Andy then sticks in the URL for Nationwide. At this point, either his local DNS cache in the Mac, in the router(?) or at his ISP (Alice) will work convert www.natiowide..etc into the appropriate IP address. During the session, he may get rerouted to a different server (therefore different IP address?) but once he's got to the server, where the HTTPS transaction he is trying to carry out is actually processed, then at that point DNS goes out of the picture.

So now we have a secure channel using one-way SSL (I'd guess ..although Andy did mention a card which suggests two-way SSL....but maybe that was another post in another thread far far away...) whatever...he has established a secure link between his Mac and their server. As far as I know, once the authentication has been carried out at the SSL level then it's not continuously re-authenticated (?) during the lifetime of the transaction.

The transaction itself (using port 443) consists of packets of data going back and forth between the Mac and their server. It's here that it goes pear-shaped and I think that the router, for whatever reason, is losing its' internal reference pointers that tell it to route data coming in on port 443 to be passed to local IP address 192.168.1.xx (ie Andy's Mac).

But that doesn't explain why a Microsoft laptop works OK and so all that I have just written could be bollocks. A little knowledge and all that.

What you`ve written is fine for the IP address and associated parameters.
However automatic-config handshaking with the router constitutes more than just getting an IP on the router network.

inside the router is all sorts of hoopy software running to service things like NAT, port fowarding, gateway translations, VPN, DNS the list goes on and on and on.

we know one thing, it DOES work on the laptop. By hook-or-crook we can get those pesky net packets for nationwide somehow.

I think from here on its a case of variable minimisation. Turn EVERYTHING off back to just a bare bones connection. Then build up from there. It means having to trawl through manuals and websites to configure everything manually but at least we know it CAN work.

sometimes these things can come down to the gateway software. My last router for example needed the DNS server of my ISP to be the "gateway" on each client. whereas my modern router allows the clients to use its IP as the "gateway".

I`m not trying to teach how to suck eggs, but from my experience most problems like this will come back to a simple issue thats easily resolved/worked around.

Steve

 

[TrimTheKing]

Sorry...my bad grammar confused things. Ignore reference to iPlayer.

Here's my take on networking 101 (but expect to be shot down).

Andy turns his Mac on, Mac asks router (using DHCP) for an IP address. This will be in the range (usually) 192.168.1.xx (192.168.0.xx). Unless Andy invokes the equivalent of an IPCONFIG /release command then that IP address is going to stay fixed. Even during access to Nationwide. So rule out anything to do with DHCP as if that didn't work, Andy wouldn't be able to access the internet at all.

Andy then sticks in the URL for Nationwide. At this point, either his local DNS cache in the Mac, in the router(?) or at his ISP (Alice) will work convert www.natiowide..etc into the appropriate IP address. During the session, he may get rerouted to a different server (therefore different IP address?) but once he's got to the server, where the HTTPS transaction he is trying to carry out is actually processed, then at that point DNS goes out of the picture.

So now we have a secure channel using one-way SSL (I'd guess ..although Andy did mention a card which suggests two-way SSL....but maybe that was another post in another thread far far away...) whatever...he has established a secure link between his Mac and their server. As far as I know, once the authentication has been carried out at the SSL level then it's not continuously re-authenticated (?) during the lifetime of the transaction.

The transaction itself (using port 443) consists of packets of data going back and forth between the Mac and their server. It's here that it goes pear-shaped and I think that the router, for whatever reason, is losing its' internal reference pointers that tell it to route data coming in on port 443 to be passed to local IP address 192.168.1.xx (ie Andy's Mac).

But that doesn't explain why a Microsoft laptop works OK and so all that I have just written could be bollocks. A little knowledge and all that.

That looks pretty much right to me Roger.

The one thing that is still confuddling me though is that it worked prior to a software/OS update, so something within that software/OS and the compatibility with the router has changed! Finding it without being able to physically play with it may well be nigh on impossible, but annoying as hell...

 

[dedee]

What can I try next then?
Can I manually configure IP and DHCP or does his have to come from the ISP?

It did occur to me that it would be possible for the ISP to upgrade the software in the router without me knowing? If this is true the fact that I last used the Nationwide site successfully on Tiger and Safari 3 might be a red herring. I could be that the router software has changed too.
Which of course brings me back to regressing back to tiger just to see?

Andy

 

[kityuser]

Finding it without being able to physically play with it may well be nigh on impossible, but annoying as hell...

cut out ALL of the auto-config BS for DHCP, DNS, gateway handshaking et al and Andy can play to his hearts content!!!!! by configuring manually. Certainly in ubuntu the options/parameter are almost endless....

Steve

 

[kityuser]

I`d boot back into 10.5, assign a manual IP (gateway, subnet et al), disable IPV6, proxies and firewall on mac and router, disable DHCP on the router, configure opendns and try again.......

Yup, agree

andy, go into the router pages, disable the DHCP for now.

manually assign an IP on the mac, subnet, DNS (open for example) , no proxies, no IPV6, gateway set to the router IP (then maybe something else, say the ISP DNS server, or a gateway address given by them).

give it a try.

turn off all of the fancy router options, VPN, port forwarding, DHCP and you could even try turning off NAT, some routers will act just like a modem when NAT is off (with a single client), some need NAT on to talk to the ethernet ports of the router).

Steve

 

[RogerS]

It's a lot to ask Andy to do...I'd struggle to work outbhow to do all this on my Mac.

Maybe easier to revert back to Tiger/Safari 3 to prove the access works OK to Nationwide if nothing else.

 

[kityuser]

It's a lot to ask Andy to do...I'd struggle to work outbhow to do all this on my Mac.

Maybe easier to revert back to Tiger/Safari 3 to prove the access works OK to Nationwide if nothing else.

:? doesn't the windows machine prove this?


I don;t mind helping with screen shots once at home, it looks boggling but its honestly not that bad, most of the leg work has been done now.......

Steve