My mom bought my son a new alienware computer. Very big. Very nice (much nicer than mine, except he gets my old monitor and I revel in 24" glory). It came with mcafee installed on it. I am not familiar with mcafee. I use symantec, and I've never had to think about it much past keeping it on and it very occasionally catches something.
My son's computer seems great, and I've made it homey by adding firefox and google desktop and various addons and open office and all that. It surfs everywhere I want to go, except videosift. At first I thought it might be the adblocker on firefox, but I can't get there on plain old internet explorer either. So I figure it has to be mcafee, so I disabled the firewall (figuring I could figure out if it was mcafee and figure out what to do correctly later: I still can't get to videosift. Even worse, after I try to get to videosift, it's like my network is frozen until I reboot my computer.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? I don't want him to be unable to go to videosift (I send him links to vids pretty much daily). Any suggestions?
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2) What exactly happens when you try to access VS?
So far, the computer seems great. I didnt' want to spend the time puting one together myself. Hell, I spent 5 hours with at&t and lynksis last night just to deal with my new wireless router's dislike for static ip, and I only did that because I spent 5 hours with my old router's company and apple because of my problems using wireless connections after iphones 1.1.3. I don't want to spend my time fixing all the billions of details, and my son has even less desire to do that than I do. I just told him he could do without a working computer if he didn't want to do his own tech support, and that's what he did, but his grandmother took pity on him.
Now that the machine is here, it seems great.
Typing "cmd" into the run box on the start button popup will do it.
In there, type "ping www.videosift.com"
and see what it reports. you can compare ti with what your PC reports.
also try "tracert www.videosift.com"
and again compare
then also try with:
"ping 54.55.231.118"
The last two lines from my machine, assuming a type well enough since I can't copy:
9 120ms 185ms 206ms get1-1-6509-a.castleaccess.com [69.43.169.80]
10 29ms 29ms 29ms 69.43.138.12
11 31ms 29ms 29ms 69-55-231-118.in-addr.arpa.johncompanies.com [69.55.231.118]
My son's computer gets to castleaccess.com, and then times out.
I have to admit that doesn't sound like mcafee.
When you ping on your sons machine, you do get the line
"Pinging www.videosift.com [69.55.231.118] with... "
as that confirms the DNS is fine even for the VS ip.
Why tracert is failing only at the very end is very strange.
What kind of home lan/network do you have? which bits connected to what?
if youve a router and shared access, are your PC's statically assigned their ips? Not sure if im going to be able to diagnose this one though. why your PC works, and his doesn't, from a shared connection, and only fail at the last stage for him, is very odd. duno if lucky would have some thoughts.
It sounds like a network issue- but if both computers are using the same network that doesn't make sense.
I wasn't imagining it was something up at videosift. I figured it was something at our end, but I have no idea what. But from my admittedly naive standpoint (I'm a computer engineer, and ask me about testing ICs, and I know a lot, but I am no network maven) it does look like for some reason castleaccess.com is blocking my son's machine. Is it possible his IP looks weird in some way? I've had dsl since almost no one did, and I have, as a legacy, a static IP. I found out when I bought my new router that people don't expect static ips these days, and I had to have a lot of conversations with experts about it and my router is in "bridge mode" if that means anything useful. Is it possible my static ip's allocation of ip to others on my network is off? But then, that would make no sense given that I have no trouble getting to videosift from my iphone when it is on the same wireless network that my son's machine is on.
There is a difference between the two machines: my machine uses a landline to get to the lynksys n-type router, and his machine uses a usb wireless key (also n-type).
If his PC dosent conect to VS even when conecting to the router jsut as yourse is and getting the IP yourse has, then i'm at a loss. i cant see how any software differences between yourse and his woudl case tracerout to fall at the alst hurdle, but yeah, perhaps castle is blocking your sons because something looks odd to them.
i'm half asleep, so logging off, but i hope you find out what the problem is
OK, I went and tried for the seventeenth time, and 4 minutes after asking to go to videosift.com, it is there, but on some sort of weird skeleton page like without styles or anything (looks like old-timey-handcoded-html). And it says it is still loading. No! now the entire screen went back to the standard "server not found" page. How can that possibly make sense unless you guys are bouncing me? I mean, I was there and had left-justified "top fifteen new videos by vote" and all, and then it was "server not found".
sniff.
This is literally the only site I have trouble getting to.
Anyway, the ips of my computer and my iphone (working fine for VS) are XXX.XXX.1.100 and XXX.XXX.1.101 and the one for my son's box (VS rejects him) is XXX.XXX.1.102.
I think you have a problem with your router setup, probably with NAT or the firewall.
Have you tried connecting your son's computer directly to your cable/dsl/whatever connection, bypassing the router?
If I was trying to stop malevolent code from accessing the network I would probably write something that the hyper ajaxiness of VS would set off in a heart-beat.
Since you are getting something from VS you may want to try a fix arvana suggested that got me around an earlier problem http://www.videosift.com/talk/infinate-loop-in-VS-30#comment-273826
I set dom.max_script_run_time to 200 in firefox and it stopped all manner of page load problems.
http://www.mozillazine.org/misc/about:config/
not sure if it will fix your prob though, as you mentioned IE also begin effected. couldn't hurt to try i expect.