Wow. What a long, strange, (irritating) trip it's been but, for the moment at least, I seem to have overcome the network malady that began abruptly yesterday morning.
Regular readers of this space may recall that I mentioned earlier that for whatever reason I suddenly found myself unable to connect to many, but not every, website. I tried all the usual things, more than once:
- unplug and restart the router, router extender, computer.
- Clear the DNS cache.
- Clear the browser cache.
- Disable third-party security software.
- Run the self-repair of said software.
- Uninstall and reinstall said software.
- Run the various Windows network configuration tools.
- Reset DNS addresses for both IPv4 and IPv6 to Automatic (the default)
- Stop and restart the DHCP service and its dependent services.
- Run the (nearly useless) Windows network troubleshooter.
Nothing helped, and the mystery of why the outage was (a) widespread but not universal among sites I tried to visit, (b) apparently localized to my machine, and (c) what were the proximal and root causes of the issue remained unresolved.
I was on the verge of actually completely burning my machine to the ground and resetting it to the out-of-the-box configuration, but before taking such a dramatic step I decided to have one more go at the simplest of things. Taking a closer look at the Ethernet adapter status on my system, I noticed that although the IPv6 portion connected to the interweb, IPv4 did not. Hmmmmmmmmm... another Google search led me back to the beginning: try resetting the router and extender by unplugging them, letting them sit unpowered for a moment, and replugging them.
Like Yosemite Sam in one or another of the Bugs Bunny / Looney Tunes I unplugged the upstairs network extender (supplied by Verizon, with their FiOS router), trudged down the stairs to unplug the main router and plug it back in after a minute or two of being offline, stomped back up the stairs to return to the home office and reconnect the extender.
Took a deep breath, restarted the computer
one more time. After another moment of waiting for the startup process to finish and for all the moving parts to settle down, I checked the Ethernet adapter status once again: it appeared to have connected for both IPv4 and IPv6 DNS resolutions. YAY! Tried to connect to this site, and succeeded! YAY again!
I still have no clue as to (a) what caused the issue to begin with, and (b) why my first re-cycling of the router didn't take care of it. (Side note: this is the second time in a few days I've had the router glitch. If it happens again anytime soon I'm going to have to have a serious chat with Verizon, I think, about a replacement. I'll also put a small UPS between the wall outlet and the router, as a buffer against momentary power dropouts, which could have been at the bottom of it all.)
Happy to be back to normal operation, but mentally exhausted by the process of getting there.