Charles The Technician

Mailbag: Problem with Flickr

Posted by Charles | Filed under Mail Bag

Dear Charles

I just came across your blog, and I have the impression that you may be able to give me a bit of useful advice regarding a somewhat obscure - but very annoying - network problem I’m having. Obviously I have no claim on your time, so please don’t feel that I’m trying to put you under any obligation; but if you can offer me any help with this, I will be very grateful.

Here’s the situation: I’m running a home network {——SNIP—–} every time I try to load a page with a Flickr flash-based “badge”, the router resets itself - and anyone who’s connected to the Net (or, I believe, to another computer in the house) gets a “Network cable unplugged” error. (It doesn’t matter which computer I’m browsing from, or which browser. We normally use FireFox, but I’ve checked with Internet Explorer and there’s no difference.) The router goes through its startup routine, and the connection is ready to use again in a minute or two; but obviously having to sit and do nothing for that much time is very, very annoying - particularly when surfing blogs though BlogExplosion or, even worse, BlogMad. (I gather you have some “issues” with BlogExplosion. I just joined there a couple of days ago; should I be feeling depressed?)

I’ve had a couple of emails back and forth with someone from Flickr, and he hadn’t heard of a problem like this before I contacted them. I’ve also put a support request in to Zyxel, and maybe they’ll have something useful to say.

—SNIP—

So - have you ever heard of a problem like this before? Can you suggest any course of action I should pursue to get things working properly? I’m a veteran applications programmer (mostly ‘C’), so I’m not exactly technically unsophisticated; but I’m not a networking/comms/Internet internals expert, so I’m a bit out of my depth in trying to guess what might be the matter.

As I said before, any help or advice you can offer will be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

-Don Radlauer
Alfei Menashe, Israel

Hey Don,

1.) Quick answer. I’m going to assume for the moment that you are using Windows since you mentioned Internet Explorer (though it’s quite possible you are using an older Version of Mac), so for this:

Click on your start button

click on run

type (without the quotation marks of course),
“notepad.exe %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts”

(Yes you can leave the %windir% in there, it works.)

Now add this line below “127.0.0.1 localhost”

——Begin Copy and Paste——–
127.0.0.1 static.flickr.com
127.0.0.1 www.flickr.com
——-End Copy and Paste———

Now save it and clear your cache (Open up options on Firefox and click on clear button on “Cache”, or Internet Explorer: Click on Tools, click on Internet Options, then click on Delete Files.)

Then happy browsing. The flickr pages won’t load up anymore.

What this does is forces your explorer to go to whatever IP address you say when it wants information from that website…in this case it is forced to look at your computer.

2.) Do you have this problem with streaming video’s? Like http://www.youtube.com/

3.) Try turning off your routers “Log” function, the refreshed connections might be causing it to keep rewriting the connections to the log and…well get corrupt at a certain file size.

4.) Make sure there isn’t any updated firmware for your router too by the way, some companies like…oh…say…netgear like to spew forth products only to patch them up to any working condition within 5 months with new firmware.

5.) Take a hammer to your router after spending some time on tech support.

6.) Invest in a different router (Hint: Be extra careful opening it up and if that don’t solve your problem…return the router.)

7.) DEFRAG!!!!11 (Link)

Love,
Charles~

if you have any computer questions you want answered feel free to ask away, and no I won’t answer any questions about DVR’s.

Write me at CharlesTheTech@hotmail.com