1) Alienware is for teh sux
2) What exactly happens when you try to access VS?

Is DNS working? Is the www.videosift.com being resolved into an IP address? Don't know about IE, but if that is the problem, other browsers will probably stall when the status bar says "Looking up www.videosift.com".

It does indeed say looking for videosift, and eventually it tells me that the server did not respond and i should double check etc. etc.

So far, the computer seems great. I didnt' want to spend the time puting one together myself. Hell, I spent 5 hours with at&t and lynksis last night just to deal with my new wireless router's dislike for static ip, and I only did that because I spent 5 hours with my old router's company and apple because of my problems using wireless connections after iphones 1.1.3. I don't want to spend my time fixing all the billions of details, and my son has even less desire to do that than I do. I just told him he could do without a working computer if he didn't want to do his own tech support, and that's what he did, but his grandmother took pity on him.

Now that the machine is here, it seems great.

DNS is working. I can get to every other site I have tried. It is only videosift (I presume also some other sites, but I can't find them). What's special about videosift? I'm on videosift from my computer now, and it's on the same subnet using the same router as my son's computer. I just can't get to videosift from his computer.

bring up a DOS style comand prompt on the new machine (unless its running vista in which case i'm possibly out of my depth)

Typing "cmd" into the run box on the start button popup will do it.

In there, type "ping www.videosift.com"
and see what it reports. you can compare ti with what your PC reports.
also try "tracert www.videosift.com"
and again compare

then also try with:
"ping 54.55.231.118"

Ping from my son's computer times out. the traceroute looks the same, except for my son's machine, it never gets past castleaccess.com (the last line in the traceroute).

The last two lines from my machine, assuming a type well enough since I can't copy:

9 120ms 185ms 206ms get1-1-6509-a.castleaccess.com [69.43.169.80]
10 29ms 29ms 29ms 69.43.138.12
11 31ms 29ms 29ms 69-55-231-118.in-addr.arpa.johncompanies.com [69.55.231.118]

My son's computer gets to castleaccess.com, and then times out.

I have to admit that doesn't sound like mcafee.

ok, that is odd. That your sons machine gets that far is weired.
When you ping on your sons machine, you do get the line
"Pinging www.videosift.com [69.55.231.118] with... "
as that confirms the DNS is fine even for the VS ip.
Why tracert is failing only at the very end is very strange.

What kind of home lan/network do you have? which bits connected to what?
if youve a router and shared access, are your PC's statically assigned their ips? Not sure if im going to be able to diagnose this one though. why your PC works, and his doesn't, from a shared connection, and only fail at the last stage for him, is very odd. duno if lucky would have some thoughts.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

That is strange- I can't think of anything on our side that would be causing this.

It sounds like a network issue- but if both computers are using the same network that doesn't make sense.

^ my only guess was there is some difference in how the router/gateway is allowing access to the two machines, but why is another matter, as i dont see how it would do that unless its been configured too directly for some reason. and even then i cant think of what configuration change it could even be.

I checked. Tracert does in deed say tracing route to videosift.com [69.55.231.118]

I wasn't imagining it was something up at videosift. I figured it was something at our end, but I have no idea what. But from my admittedly naive standpoint (I'm a computer engineer, and ask me about testing ICs, and I know a lot, but I am no network maven) it does look like for some reason castleaccess.com is blocking my son's machine. Is it possible his IP looks weird in some way? I've had dsl since almost no one did, and I have, as a legacy, a static IP. I found out when I bought my new router that people don't expect static ips these days, and I had to have a lot of conversations with experts about it and my router is in "bridge mode" if that means anything useful. Is it possible my static ip's allocation of ip to others on my network is off? But then, that would make no sense given that I have no trouble getting to videosift from my iphone when it is on the same wireless network that my son's machine is on.

There is a difference between the two machines: my machine uses a landline to get to the lynksys n-type router, and his machine uses a usb wireless key (also n-type).

if your machines static ip is assigned directly as a consequence of the land line, and not according to the mac address of your PC, then i'd imagine connecting his PC using that landline (if possible) would let your sons PC appear to the outside world just as your's does with your routers configuration. if you can easily "ish" do that, and set his network settings as yourse are now, so he has your static Ip, and that makes everything work, then somehow changing the configuration of your router should fix the problem (how and what is another matter)

If his PC dosent conect to VS even when conecting to the router jsut as yourse is and getting the IP yourse has, then i'm at a loss. i cant see how any software differences between yourse and his woudl case tracerout to fall at the alst hurdle, but yeah, perhaps castle is blocking your sons because something looks odd to them.

i'm half asleep, so logging off, but i hope you find out what the problem is

OK. I take it back. Are you sure you guys didn't somehow block the ip from my kid's computer? When I try to go to videosift, it says it is transferring data from videosift.com, and it even knows the little slogan abbut * quality *.

OK, I went and tried for the seventeenth time, and 4 minutes after asking to go to videosift.com, it is there, but on some sort of weird skeleton page like without styles or anything (looks like old-timey-handcoded-html). And it says it is still loading. No! now the entire screen went back to the standard "server not found" page. How can that possibly make sense unless you guys are bouncing me? I mean, I was there and had left-justified "top fifteen new videos by vote" and all, and then it was "server not found".

sniff.

This is literally the only site I have trouble getting to.

I don't know if it is bad to tell people your ip... is it?

Anyway, the ips of my computer and my iphone (working fine for VS) are XXX.XXX.1.100 and XXX.XXX.1.101 and the one for my son's box (VS rejects him) is XXX.XXX.1.102.

very strange. and i cant sleep.

I'm gonna take a wild guess that the first two bytes of your internal IP addresses are 192.168. It's a standard subnet which is reserved for local networks.

I think you have a problem with your router setup, probably with NAT or the firewall.

Have you tried connecting your son's computer directly to your cable/dsl/whatever connection, bypassing the router?

I'm presuming this machine is Vista, which apparently ships with rather restrictive network access control. Have you looked at the windows firewall/security as well as disabling mcafee?

If I was trying to stop malevolent code from accessing the network I would probably write something that the hyper ajaxiness of VS would set off in a heart-beat.

Since you are getting something from VS you may want to try a fix arvana suggested that got me around an earlier problem http://www.videosift.com/talk/infinate-loop-in-VS-30#comment-273826
I set dom.max_script_run_time to 200 in firefox and it stopped all manner of page load problems.

I will look into the suggestions people have made. I don't have vista though: just plain old vanilla XP.

Is this dom.max_script_run_time something I set? Is this only vista, or also xp? Is this a setting in something I run, or a variable in a file somewhere?

Its firefox specific.

http://www.mozillazine.org/misc/about:config/

not sure if it will fix your prob though, as you mentioned IE also begin effected. couldn't hurt to try i expect.