unfortunatley logging on the router was disabled which i see now was a mistake to not enable it. my dns is handled out side of my lan by register.com, but that is only for access to the website outside of my lan and for my MX records. i dont need any DNS to access my website or email or ftp or telnet or anything from inside my lan as i use the internal ips. but yes, what i have been thinking is the problem is something weird with my router, i am going to try updating the firmware, im hesitant to do it cause you know if its working id rather not fix it. but yeah something is wrong and the only thing i can come up with is the router, is it possible that when i try to access my website with the external WAN address that some kind of loop happens, like something goes wrong when a computer on my lan sends a request over the internet for itself, i dunno im clueless at this point. also port 10000 is not available outside of my lan, the ports i have open are 80, 25 and 110, all forwareded to 192.168.1.2 the internal address of my server. also during the outage i can always ftp or telnet to my self (*on the server) with the loop back AND the internal ip. another thign i forgot to mention is that during the outage, if i try to telnet or ftp or get my mail, i will be connected, but nothing will happen. when i check the logs on the server it will say a connection has been established, but when i do a netstat when the dsl is out the process will hang. weird right?

AHHHHH!!!! just thought of something!!!! Is your server trying to do reverce DNS look-ups???? This would explain why the sesions are hanging. Add the IP addresses of your local boxes to the hosts file, see if that improves the situation.

Did it work????

i read your post, i am going to try it it does sound pretty good. the only problem with it is that the other computers on my network use dynamic ip addys. so what i would do is just put them in hosts and see if it works but then i might aswell just take them out cause it wont be correct upon next reboot of the pcs. thanks for your responce though. if i get bored one day i might try to wright some sort of shell script to use SMB to see whos who on my network then add them to the hosts file, i dont know if that would be worth it though, or even if i could do it.

I would just put in generic addresses;

192.10.10.1 dhcp1
192.10.10.2 dhcp2
192.10.10.3 dhcp3
192.10.10.4 dhcp4

and then give it a go. I dont know what the licences are like on the router, they may be 3 hours or 4 days, either way I dont think that they will change too much (probably just enought to get on your neaves every now and again).

i will try it right now actually. haha yeah i had my server configured for dhcp and everytime (well almost) i had to reboot because of work being done on the house and the power being taken down, i had to put the new ip in the firewall config. hahahaha once i didnt get anymail for a week cause i forgot to change the ip!

oh yeah, im gonna do this at like 2 in the morning so i wont miss anything and i wont miss any hits on the site and i will turn off the dsl modem and see what happens. haha not that my site gets many hits anyway.