Fix: Can't connect to any sites with a 64.x.x.x IP address

Yesterday, my wife Melissa noticed a problem with our home Internet connection: certain websites, including my own jonschneider.com, would not load. The browser would get past the "looking up..." step (so DNS resolution was working fine), but the website would simply never respond to the HTTP request, and the browser would eventually give a "Network Timeout - The server at [site] is taking too long to respond" error.

Troubleshooting the issue this evening, I started to notice a pattern in the sites that were working, versus those that were not working:

Working Sites

Site	IP Address
charter.com	24.217.29.127
godaddy.com	208.109.132.201
umich.edu	141.211.13.226
yahoo.com	206.190.60.37
blog.jonschneider.com	209.85.133.191

Non-Working Sites

Site	IP Address
jonschneider.com	64.202.163.124
www.savingsangel.com	64.20.60.82
gametap.com	64.236.22.82
idp.godaddy.com	64.202.188.237
www.google.com	64.233.169.103

Did you spot the pattern? (If not, take a closer look at the IP addresses.) Once I started looking at the IP addresses of the working sites versus the non-working sites, it quickly became obvious: Attempts to connect to sites with 64.x.x.x IP addresses were not working, whereas all other sites that I tried worked just fine. I had never heard of an issue like this before. I initially didn't really have a good idea where along the pipeline of [Client PC] - [Router] - [Cable Modem] - [ISP] - [Internet] - [Web Server] the problem was likely to be.

It wasn't just http requests that were failing; I couldn't successfully ping, tracert, or connect via ftp to any of the "non-working" sites, either. I was able to successfully connect to some of the sites from work; plus, given that if a site like the google.com homepage had any significant downtime at all it was likely to immediately be big news, and there had been no such news, I was able to rule out the web server as the problem. I was able to reproduce the problem on a couple of different client machines and different web browsers from home, so that (most likely) ruled out the client PC as the issue. My suspicion at this point was some kind of problem at the ISP level; I figured that since I was able to browse some websites with no problem at all, my router and cable modem must be ok.

This turned out to be a bad assumption. I had tried "rebooting" the cable modem (by disconnecting the power, waiting a couple of minutes, and then reconnecting) early in the troubleshooting process, but that step had had no effect. Throughout the process, I had assumed my router was ok. However, when I used the router's browser-based administration application to try and perform a release/renew on its Internet IP address, and the application simply stopped responding after the new request, I immediately (and to my chagrin, for the first time) suspected some kind of problem with the router. I cycled the power on the router (unplug, wait briefly, plug back in), and that turned out to be the solution! Immediately, all of the 64.x.x.x sites were working fine once again.

I'm still not sure why cycling the power on the router was the solution to the issue, except that to guess that apparently, after weeks (or maybe even months) of uptime, the router had managed to get itself into a bad state, and cycling the power was enough to refresh whatever internal memory the router has back into a good state. Hopefully, this post will be a time saver for anyone else out there who manages to run across this issue -- at least, so long as this blog doesn't get changed to have a 64.x.x.x IP address! :-) I have had various problems with this router -- a Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B that's now over a couple of years old -- before (1, 2, 3). I think it may be time to start keeping my eyes open for a sale, and jump on a deal to replace this router when the right deal presents itself.