Network or Security problem?

Strange things happening this week. Small peer-to-peer network consisting of 2XP machines and 2 Win98 machines. We have a web site being hosted with a web hosting company. On Tuesday we were unable to reach our web site's home page. We verified the rest of the world was able to view the site. Our email is served via this same server, and we had no problems with email. We were able to reach a back door of our web site. Around 3PM, we were allowed access to our home page. We have not been able to determine what caused the problem, nor what happened to allow us to have access again. The error we were receiving was a standard page not found error.Both or web hosting company and ISP gave valid reasons for not being their problem. Tried both IE and Netscape, and both failed

On Wednesday we were unable to send email out. Our smtp settings use the same server from the situation listed above. Again, our ISP and Web hosting company have given valid reasons as to why it's not their problem. Any thoughts?????????????

DNS error within your network springs to mind. Do you have a DNS server inside your network?

A DNS error wouldn't give a page not found (404) error. Your browser would complain it couldn't find the server. But on the other hand.... If someone was trying DNS cache poisening to their own site... and that fake site doesn't have this perticular page... hmm.

Any work being done on the data/phone lines between you and the hosting company?

I'm new to this area, I can't figure out how to reply to each posting individually.


Our internal network consists of 4 machines connected to the router that our DSL provided. We do not have a file server.


There has been no indication of telephone line problem. We have 4 phone lines, and have not experienced any problems.

Possibly you're ISP provider went down...re-issued an IP address..which you're router didn't pick up. Assuming you're private network is dynamic IP address.

Anytime our DSL has a hic-cup, (even with static IP) we have to power off/on our router(s)

It's worth testing.

I was on the phone with our DSL provider for about 6 hours. They believe the problem does not exist within them. Because we were only unable to not get to our home page, they assume we have connection, and the problem exists somewhere else.


We have static IP's. On our network, we are sharing some folders and printers, nothing fancy.

You said you were able to access other things...does that include other web-pages? Did you try to access a page on your web-site other than the main page? When it happens, does it last for the same amount of time? Did anything similiar happen right before/during/after the problem was fixed/disappeared?

I don't know exactly what's causing it, but knowing this might help us track down the problem.

Next time it happens, do try re-booting all of your machines and your router/modem. Its a magic fix, and it sometimes works wonders.

Yes, we were able to do everything except view our home page. We are an ecommerce company. The shopping cart that we use has a control panel, we were able to view, and enter the back end of the shopping cart and perform maintenance.

When the problem first happened, I shut off all the machines, and turned off both the DSL router and hub. I left everything off for about 5 minutes. We were unable to view the home page for about 4 hours, and then it started functioning properly.

The problem with the email started the next day, and continued until this morning. When I arrived in the office, I changed my smtp settings on my machine, and I'm able to send messages out. My smtp settings are now my web site's server.

Thank you for your replies!!!

Do you have any scripts running on the main page of your website? Anything that would involve cookies or needing to login possibly? If its just straight HTML then I have no idea...

I'm glad to hear, BTW, that the e-mail is now working and you have your settings corrected. Hopefully the problem won't come back, but it'd still be nice if we could figure out what caused it. (Call it a learning experience?)

I don't believe we have any scripts running. My web designer has been aware of my problem. And becuase the rest of the world was able to view the site, it doesn't seem like the web site was the problem.

My ongoing concern are what caused it, when and where this will strike again.