Strange networking problem. Google does not work

Question

Google does not work, like just Google. This is the weirdest error I have ever seen.

Every 20-30 minutes Google stops working in my browser, any other page works. Then in 5-10 minutes, it just comes back.

Naturally the first thing I do is pull up the terminal and try to ping google.com. It works fine. Next, I try a different browser, still nothing. Next I try another computer on the same network, it loads Google no problem.

I tried both wired and wifi, I tried static ip and dynamic ip, nothing works. It seems to have a mind of its own. This is so hard to diagnose because of its intermittent nature.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

After trying a ton of things, I got frustrated and just reinstalled Ubuntu. Since then, the problem seems to have gone away.

Answer 2

Some (trivial, basic) ideas

• reset your router (or at least inspect its settings)
• clear browsers' cookies & cache
• reboot (inter alia this will clear tmp, can't harm)
• try in different browsers
• try with a proxy (should almost definitely work)

Answer 3

Probably a failed but cached DNS query.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart  

or

# service dnsmasq restart

Then restart whatever browser you are using to wipe it's cache.

Maybe some app or plug-in you had, but forgot about, was wiped out on the re-install.