Baba-sensei called me across to her desk today and asked if I could help her with her computer, as she couldn't access the Internet. So I checked out the usual things and found out that the network was 'working' according to Windows, but packets weren't going anywhere. I moved her across onto Nishitani-sensei's network connection and both the network and DNS seemed to start working ok, but no traffic could actually reach those Internet addresses when using IE. The packets would whizz away fine into the Board of Education network, but then get dropped somewhere. I assumed it was a firewall or something similar doing it, so I told Baba-sensei I couldn't fix it and suggested she talk to Tatamiya-sensei, the teacher in charge of the school computers/networks.

Anyway, Tatamiya-sensei turned up a while later and the solution turned out to be ridiculously simple. The BoE runs a proxy which Internet traffic has to go through, and for some unknown reason, Baba-sensei's IE had decided to stop using the proxy settings. I really kicked myself for not checking it, as I've hit the same problem a few times over the years (including twice here at school). Oh well, at least I was mostly right - the problem was Internet packets being dropped by a machine over in the BoE network ;) Just wish I could have gotten that little bit further to the answer being the proxy and fix being the local proxy settings!