very weird issue

["David Zimmerman" <dzimmerm@columbus.rr.com>]

Hello,

I run openbsd 3.0. I use it as a NAT machine and also as a firewall.

I have 3 W2K machines on a old SMC hub that is natted and behind
the firewall.

Today, my wife complained that she could not access http://www.rootsweb.com
but she can access http://homepages.rootsweb.com . I verified that this was
true.

I thought our ISP must have had issues so I contacted them with a live chat.
They
wanted me to hook my wifes machine directly to the cable modem to see if that
worked.

I did not immediately do this but I finally did.

I had to reconfigure my wife w2k machine to use dhcp. After connecting my
wifes
w2k machine directly to the cablemodem it could access http://www.rootsweb.com
.
I noted that the ISP had given her PC a different IP address and one of the
dns
servers had changed.

I hooked her PC back up through the openbsd 3.0 machine and restarted the
openbsd 3.0 machine. It went back to it's old IP address but did see the new
DNS server as I have dhclient working on the NIC attached to the cablemodem.

I thought, great, there is a new dns server and that is why things were not
working.

Nope, still can not access http://www.rootsweb.com. I then hooked my wifes PC
back up to the cablemodem and it used the the same IP address as the openbsd
3.0
machine. It could once again access http://www.rootsweb.com.

I am starting to wonder what was up. I tried disabling pf by commenting out
all of the
rules and uncommenting the pass all in and out rules. This indeed took away my
stealth status per www.grc.com but it did not help me access
http://www.rootsweb.com .

I looked through your bug reports but found nothing for 3.0 that indicates any
kind of whacky
problem in accessing some websites and not others. I will try and elimenate
the hub from
the equation as it is a switching hub so it has the potential to do bad things
but that is
reaching.

Of course all of this worked fine until today. Of course I had not changed
anything as
it was all working up till today.

I know this is really weird but it does seem to be related to the firewall /
nat machine stopping
something from happening.

If you have any suggestions I would like to hear them. I have purchased your
openbsd 3.2 cd's
but have not installed them as openbsd 3.0 was working fine the way it was. If
you can not help
me I would appreciate hearing that also as I know this kind of problem might
not be related to
openbsd 3.0 at all.

Sincerely,

David Zimmerman
dzimmerm@columbus.rr.com