DNS could not blah blah blah

Frequently now as of Sunday I have been getting nothing but problems with SL, I have not installed any new software, hardware, or changed any settings to see why these problems would suddenly start.

DNS could not resolve the host name has been a message I have seen far too often now, I click connect and the majority of the time I am met with this error, being unable to fully log into SL.

Then when I can finally log into SL on a lucky shot if I try connect to streaming music, or just open a web page like www.google.ca at the same time as being connected to SL, or even connect to a messenger they refuse to make the connection left hanging until I close SL and they instantly connect with no problem.

With SL logged out I could connect freely with any program, I could be running LOTRO with a winamp stream, connected to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk and Skype at the same time.

I’ve fully uninstalled SL twice now, tried to reinstall it afterwards and the same persistent problems still continue.

Anyone find this familiar?

Solution! I had to make some advanced settings to my firewall, I use comodo firewall pro, and these are the changes I had to make for full SL functionality, even if it was a little odd I could easily connect before these changes were made;

First I had to make network rules to allow communication with the IP addresses 142.161.2.155, 142.161.130.155, and 66.150.244.151. When I did a whois with these they all came up as Linden Labs.

My next setting was under my program rules, allowing all connections with TCP or UDP going In/Out, also setting in miscellaneous options Allow invisible connection attempts, and Skip advanced security checks.

And that’s how the mystery was solved.

I'm glad you got it working but you might want to tone down the settings a bit - it sounds like you pretty much totally disabled your filewall.. Dangerous..

Search the KB for 'firewall' and you should find a list of ports that you need to open up.

It does sound like I opened up the floodgates, but it wasn’t a total swinging door, I just had to give SL all the access it wanted while keeping every other program locked down, the only problem I could face was if a virus uses SL to piggyback now.