Problem with Google URLs not loading?

[Ashley Aitken]

Howdy All,

I'm having a strange problem within my LAN.  Any machine on the  
wireless part of the LAN can't seem to access any Google URL (www.google.com 
, news.google.com, www.google.com.au etc).  The sites just time out in  
Safari and Firefox.  It also affects any other sites that use Google  
Analytics, but other than that all Web browsing works fine.

I thought it may be a DNS problem since I am trying to run a DNS  
server for local (internal) machines (with limited success since the  
transition to Leopard Server - but that is another story).  However,  
"dig" seems to suggest that the machines have no trouble looking up  
Google sites, and I have taken the local DNS server out the search  
path without any improvement.

Entering the actual IP addresses for Google also fails to load the  
pages at all (although I guess this could be due to the fact that the  
pages themselves may contain references to other resources using fully  
qualified domain names?).  To tell you the truth I am not sure, and I  
am really confused by this (not difficult to do, i.e. confusing me).

MS Live Searching (for obvious reasons) seems to suggest that a few  
others may have had a similar problem (in the past), particularly with  
wireless LANs.  I should have also said that all Google sites work  
fine from our wired LAN.  And our wireless LAN is just an Ad-Hoc  
network between a number of machines using their Airport Extreme cards.

I also thought routing could be a problem (since I don't use "Internet  
Sharing" for the wireless LAN, rather I route packets to/from the Ad- 
Hoc network).  However, as I mentioned all other sites and Internet  
access seems to be ok.

What does my wireless LAN have against Google?

I seem to have ruled out DNS, browser, routing.

Thanks for any suggestions / pointers.

Cheers,
Ashley.

--
Ashley Aitken
Perth, Western Australia
mrhatken at mac dot com
Skype Name: MrHatken (GMT + 8 Hours!)