Bizzare internet problem that needs genius insight

[afroguy013]

Ok, I have never seen anything like this before and I've got no clue as to what to do.

My other computer is running Mandrake 10.1 (as is this one, but this has never happened to me on this one)

As of last night, my DSL internet connection was working perfectly, and so was the internet. My dad used it last night and swears that he didn't change any settings, but after booting up this morning, while the DSL connection was still working, for some reason the internet was not. EVERY SINGLE (I'm talking all of them: Mozilla, Konquerer, Epiphany, Galeon, etc...) browser no longer recognized the internet as a readable "filetype". Instead it tried to download the data as a .bin (which didn't help one damn bit...)

So I thought "Ok, i'll just reboot and that should solve the problem."

Wrong.

So I thought "Ok, I'll just reinstall all my internet browsers and reboot and that should solve the problem."

Wrong.

So I thought "Ok, I'm going to reprogram this piece of junk with an axe" but came to my senses too quickly.

I've got no clue what to do short of reinstalling the entire OS again. It seems to me that my web browsers have suddenly lost the ability to read HTML (which doesn't make sense at all). Reinstallation wouldn't be too much trouble seeing as I just wiped over Linspire with Mandrake a few days ago and there would be zero data loss, but Ijust don't want to have to do it AGAIN...

And as I've stated before, I've never had that problem on this computer either.

Has anyone run into this before, if so how did you fix it? If not can you offer any advice?

Stats of the afflicted computer:
Mandrake 10.1
AMD Sempron 2200
256 MB Ram


Thanks in advance.

[jordower]

i'll try to look some stuff up, but in the meantime why dont you check your dns settings and see if your ISP's dns server is down
also try pinging some big site like google, both with the IP address and with the domain name
the IP for google is 66.102.7.104
if you cant get through on the domain but you can on the IP, the problem is with the DNS

[afroguy013]

ok, go figure it works now.

I must be a genius after all.

That was very bizzare. One hour it's broken, next it's not. I'm not going to complain.

[jordower]

your isp's dns server was probably down for a couple hours

[loft306]

your isp's dns server was probably down for a couple hours

Isp's dns servers are notorious for crapping out!

[kkubasik]

Its more the windows DNS servers that spout out the poisened caches like nobodies, Bind 8 and up are immune, but go figure... it would be windows spamming the net and killing it for the rest of us.

[afroguy013]

actually it happened again today, but I had a hunch that it was something wrong with the modem, so I just unplugged and then restarted the modem, and it turns out that I was right. Something messes with the modem, so all I've got to do is simply restart the modem and it works fine.

Go figure...