Windows XP ICS giving out

[obeseotron]

I use my XP machine with 2 onboard NICs as an ICS gateway. One port to the cable modem, another to a switch connected to my roomates' computers and an xbox. I've run ICS for years and set it up for a lot of friends and family and never had any real issues with it. Recently every so often my roomates partially lose internet access. I say partially because they can still send and recieve IMs, but web browsing no longer works. Unsharing and resharing the connection makes everything fine again, at least for about a day. Any Ideas.

 

[mjia]

Have you ruled out the roomates' pc? Have you tried using the repair connection function and restarting that machine? What about the xbox? Have you tried switching the ports on the ICS machine (ie plug the modem into the other NIC).

 

[nweaver]

IM sometimes works fine when DNS dies. I would suspect it's DNS related. When it dies, try to see if nslookup works on anything.

 

[randomlinh]

what would cause dns to die on an xp client? I'm actually trying to figure that out now on our network... this sounds oddly related (symptoms anyway)

 

[obeseotron]

Well it gives out for all the clients on the network (one xp laptop, one os x desktop, and an xbox) both give out at the same time, so yeah I've definitely ruled it out being one of the clients. The internet doesn't die in any way for me. I've suspected a DNS issue because "ping www.yahoo.com" doesn't even return an ip from one of the clients when they are malfunctioning, but that still doesn't bring me a lot closer to figuring out how to fix it. ICS has basically zero configuration, it basically works and that's all. Repairing the connection on the xp client or refreshing the dhcp on the mac doesn't fix it, the only thing that fixes it is disabling and reenabling ICS on the gateway xp machine.

 

[Kibbo86]

One way to support the idea that it is DNS related is to try pinging yahoo's IP when you are unable to ping the domain. Also, is the host able to ping the clients when they are down?

I know that a corrupt winsock can cause DNS problems on a single computer, I wonder if a corrupt winsock on the host could give the same probs to its client pcs?

 

[KB]

Get rid of ICS and get a modem sharing hub/router. They are like 30 bucks nowadays.