Secure nothing
QI have a strange problem that started a couple of days ago after a small system update. However, I’m not sure if that was the cause. I cannot log into my banking sites, I can access bank home pages but not log in. The page times out. I can access Gmail and most other websites, Hotmail was slow but does log in. I tried traceroute after 12 or 15 tries it shows only asterisks. I called my ISP and it didn’t know. It called Telstra, my telco and they didn’t know either. I tried using my phone on Wi-Fi at home and had the same problem, When I turned off Wi-Fi and used mobile data, I could connect to the bank’s login. I’m using Firefox and Chromium with Lubuntu. Alan Buckley, Australia
AAs you are seeing the same problem from your computer and your phone when using the same internet connection, but the phone works fine when using mobile data, it’s safe to assume that the problem is not in your system nor was it caused by the update. If you really want to be sure of this, try taking the computer to a friend’s house and connecting it to their network, especially if they use a different ISP.
The problem could possibly be in your router, it seems that traffic to port 443 (the HTTPS port) is being blocked somewhere, but that’s unlikely. It would be interesting to see the traceroute output. If it really goes a dozen hops before failing, the problem is unlikely to be in your router but somewhere a dozen hops away.
We would try power cycling your router or even resetting to its default settings. We don’t have much hope of it making a difference, but it’s one of the first things your ISP’s support desk would tell you to do.
What you need to do is compile a list of the sites that don’t work and see if it’s only those with https:// URLs and see if you can connect to the sites at all, e.g. try http:// www.google.com and https://www. google.com. Email this information to your ISP’s support people, along with the output from traceroute. If the problem exists upstream of your modem, they are the only people who are able and obliged to help you.
These types of problem are notoriously difficult to diagnose and the best approach involves eliminating what isn’t causing the problem. Once you’ve eliminated everything your side of the phone socket, send all the information to your ISP.