Problem :
I have a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04 plugged into our office LAN. Everything works fine except the Internet connection. I can open a couple of Internet pages then my browser starts “waiting” for any page requests. Pinging any public websites also takes long to reply and experiences packet loss greater than 70%. Updating software packeges also fails within a minute or so after started.
I have removed network-manager and installed wicd and problem stays exactly the same.
My /etc/network/interfaces file
auth lo
iface lo inet loopback
auth eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
Any suggestions or other info I can give to nail this issue?
Solution :
Do the timeouts occur after a period of normal operation?
Try changing the network cable/point of connection to the network.
Connect you computer directly (using a crossover cable) to another computer, repeat ping and other network tests.
Check if other computer have difficulty contacting the Ubuntu 10.04 machine.
If you think it might be a configuration issue rather than hardware, get another live linux distro and see if the same problems occur.
Problem solved. Turns out there was an IP conflict and Ubuntu doesn’t automatically detect this.
A printer on our network has been assigned a static IP (by our IT dept.) within the dynamic IP range and the DNS server repeatedly assigned this IP to my Ubuntu machine. After another restart my Internet connection seemed to work perfectly, I checked and the IP was suddenly different than before. This got me thinking. Using Angry IP Scanner (excellent tool) I found that a printer was using the old IP.
I’ve changed the printer’s static IP now and I’m planning to investigate IPWatchD, which is en IP conflict detection tool for Linux