Port Forwarding

[Socketman]

I think I gotta let this go. LOL I have upgraded the firmware on the router and set factory defaults ,still get the 253.44 ip address. I hooked straight to the cable modem with dhcp and I get the .253.44 ip address. The firware seemed to improve my web pages loading speed (subjective ) Google chrome shows .191.237 and some sites on IE think im behind proxy. Foxwood I believe you are correct that is something to do with my isp. I unplugged router for 2 hours and got the same ip. I called them and they spanked it from their end and still same ip.

[foxwood]

Change the domain name on your router - it shouldn't be your ISPs domain name. Or go into the IE settings and disable "Automatically detect Settings" (Tools/Interent Options/Connection. I'm not sure how you change it for IE10-Metro).

Using the ISPs proxy server is good for the ISP (it can save bandwidth) and in some cases can be good for you, but it's a bit odd that they use WPAD to implement it (because it's so easy to circumvent). But it's not that big a deal, except where it causes confusion like this. (And there's the small issue of URL logs and privacy, but you're in Canada, so you're probably OK )

[Socketman]

i will give it a shot tonite

[Socketman]

Problem solved. Set my isp address to static in router config, change last digit from 236 to 238 and now it works as it should. seems Foxwood had it right all along ,something on my ISP's end. Web pages load lightning fast now too. Thanks too all who helped.

[Socketman]

Foxwood, i see why you had me ping wpad now. It seems that IE automatically look for a wpad when it connects to the isp. The other nite when you said to ping wpad it resolved and returned a result. When i tried the ping wpad on my work computers it returned a result of "ping request could not find wpad" after changing my ip address on my home computer it could no longer locate wpad. This is what you said in the following statement.

By default, IE will use a proxy auto-discovery mechanism. Open a command prompt and type ping wpad

If the hostname wpad resolves to an IP address, then your ISP may be running a proxy that IE is using, but Chrome isn't. There are much more efficient ways to set up proxies, though, so if that test works, it's more likely to be an old experiment that wasn't cleaned up than an ongoing serviceNow if i had read that properly i would have better understood what you were saying ,but i feel good knowing i have abit of a handle on what the primary issue was. Funny only the one computer on my network was discovering the wpad.

Is this why you suggested turning off the auto discovery in lan setting?

[foxwood]

Is this why you suggested turning off the auto discovery in lan setting?

Auto-Discovery in IE tells IE to look for http://wpad.(domainname)/wpad.dat. A valid wpad.dat file contains a small javascript routine that can be used to decide which proxy server to use for any given HTTP request. These are widely used behind firewalls (where you wouldn't go through a proxy to get to an internal web server, and might want to use a specific proxy for accessing a business partners website, for example, and a different proxy for general web access. These scripts, also known as proxy.pac, can be quite powerful and convoluted, depending on how complex the network is). If that URL doesn't exist, IE just continues on without a proxy.

I presume Chrome can do auto-discovery, but it is probably off by default.

The key thing here is that your router was specifying your ISPs domain name. You referred to both "static addresses" and "MAC reservations" - if you applied static addresses manually, then your PCs wouldn't have used your ISPs domain name, and Auto-Discovery probably wouldn't work, but if you used "MAC reservations" to always apply the same IP address to any given machine, you're still using the routers DHCP function, so the PCs would get the domain name that the router gave them, and therefore Auto-Discovery would kick in.

My own preference is to avoid an ISPs proxy server (though I can understand why an ISP in the Yukon might want to optimize bandwidth by implementing one) but it isn't something I'd lose sleep over - an ISP can always implement a transparent proxy that the customer can't easily avoid if the really want to.

[Socketman]

Thanks for all your help foxwood and for sharing your vast knowledge of networking. It is very much appreciated and thanks for making something complicated seem a little less so.


Richard

[foxwood]

Glad to help - I really didn't expect to be right when I pitched in, but it was the only way I could explain the results you were seeing, and it turns out I managed to pick up on that one weird thing that was giving you those results.

[Socketman]

I luv a good puzzle,keeps you sharp.