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Connection works fine but cannot ping in command prompt?

G

GrandSpleen

Member
A friend of mine is having strange network problems. He's got a Dell Inspiron 8500, purchased in 2003. It has a Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller in it, running the most current drivers available on Dell's support site.

When you open a command prompt and try to ping any website, the requests time out. I tried to run a traceroute to see where it was getting held up, but after attempting to run the traceroute for a few minutes, the computer freezes and must be hard booted. And ipconfig command shows that the computer is obtaining an IP address correctly. All this is from the University of Hawaii's resident network -- we're living in a dorm.

Now here's the good part: the internet connection works fine.

If you open up IE, you can browse the net with no problems at all. Connection is fast and responsive. However, he is a World of Warcraft player. When he is in game there is no trouble, but connecting to a server can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour (due to an exceptionally long connection time and frequent failed connection attempts).

Anyone know what might be causing this? I wish I could get the computer to give me a traceroute, but given the way it is acting, I am tempted to leave well enough alone. It works for him, if sluggishly in that one respect, so I'd hate to make it worse. But the fact that it seems to work fine in a browser but can't ping anything at all in a command prompt confuses me. Any ideas?
Thanks!
-GS
 
Sounds like the university is shaping/disallowing gaming on its internet connection. Its also common practice to block pings to the internet, and its common practice to "shape" the traffic of internet gaming to speeds much worse than a 9600 baud modem.

the question is...just his machine or others?
 
yeah my university blocks pings and traceroutes. They also use packeteers to throttle traffic. I think your best bet would be to contact your university IT department via email and explain your problem and find out if it is their security policy that is causing your trouble... odds are its their fault.
 
Sorry, I guess I should have mentioned that. This only affects his system, everyone else is working fine. Three out of four people living in our dorm apartment are fine, and I know other people on campus have no troubles, either. He had these problems last year too (in a different room), and it doesn't matter which data port he plugs his laptop into in the apartment. The folks at ITS here are pretty nice about gaming -- I think most of them are gamers themselves. They've opened ports for me in the past =)

 
well then it sounds like his IP stack may be fubarred.

There is a link on microsoft on how to repair the tcp/ip stack.
 
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