Changes...

As the firewall I was using before Christmas crapped out and I had switched to a direct computer connection - I am installing another firewall. There may be some missing links until I get it tweaked.

This is the same firewall that I had a problem with before. I threw it back in because I want to see why it connects to 99.9% of the Internet fine, but blocks certain sites. Plugging the cable directly into my computer does away with all problems, so I know it's the firewall. As I am not filtering squat (technical term), and really only using it for PAT and forwarding of parts of my blog, I'm going to need to check logs and get deeper into the tech support. All outbound requests should be passed, but a few are not.

All sites that are registered/hosted by what appears to be

Name Server: NS3.HMDNSGROUP.COM
Name Server: NS4.HMDNSGROUP.COM

are blocked: timblair.net, saysuncle.com, powerlineblog.com...etc. Altho I have no problem getting to e-nough at http://www.e-nough.hmdnsgroup.com/. This is HostingMatters.

That is strange. If I cable direct into my machine I'm OK. When I cable thru this firewall only things coming from HMDNSGROUP are blocked at the firewall. Getting closer to the solution. Spoofing the MAC address on the firewall to match that of the desktop doesn't work either.

Update: OK, getting down to it.

Adding the DNS server IP address from HostingMatters to my desktop as an alternate allows access to the web sites thru the firewall, but then the blog doesn't resolve items (mainly pictures) kept on my local machine. Adding the DNS address to the firewall directly doesn't seem to do anything. I'm going to static up the IP on my local machine and see if adding HostingMatters DNS as a static alternate does any good.

Nope...in order to get access to HostingMatters web sites thru this firewall, it wants the HM DNS server to be the primary. If I do that, then I can't access items local to my machine on the blog. I'm going to play a bit with the order.

Solved it, but I'm not sure why. I removed HostingMatters DNS server IP from the router, and added it as the primary on my desktop, with Comcast DNS as secondaries. I can access all the sites and my blog appears to have connection with the items hosted on my local machine. Why would this wireless router set up simply as a gateway cause this problem - when I plug Comcast directly into my machine the problem goes away. So to solve the problem, I'm using another company's DNS server as a primary instead of the DNS servers of my ISP. That's just wrong.

Oops. Everything but Google. Can't have that.

Last Update: Clearing the resolver cache and adding the HostingMatters DNS server as the 3rd resolver on my desktop - leaving the DNS servers on the firewall only to Comcast - seems to have done the trick. As far as I can tell I'm getting everywhere now. Really tho, I should not have to add a HostingMatters server to my DNS list only when I'm connected to a firewall.