[DiscarnateCamel]

Recentely at work, I have had to work out of a different building than usual about a quarter of the time. When I am at my regular desk (hooked up via a wired ethernet connection), my MacBook Pro connects to any and all internet sites without fail. However, whenever I connect my computer to a wired jacked in the other building, I am only able to access websites that I can ping (i.e. I can get to yahoo.com, but not cnn.com). Both jacks are on the same subnet and I'm able to get my correct DHCP address in both locations. I know that DNS is working fine because I can run a lookup on cnn.com and get the IP address, but I am still not able to browse to it. What makes this problem even more random/strange is that several of my co-workers who work in the building where I experience network connectivity problems have MacBook Pros as well - ordered at the same time as mine - and they have no problems at all on the same jacks. The only difference in our MacBook Pros is that mine had its MLB replaced about a month ago. Has anyone run into this problem before or can think of anything that would cause it - the network administrator for our department and I are all out of ideas (though we may be missing something obvious)? I know my description isn't the best, but I'd be happy to provide any details that would be useful. Thanks in advance for any help.

[mfbernstein]

If you have Boot Camp and/or Parallels installed, you might check whether the problem exists there too. Alternatively, are there any users in your building using other sorts of Macs (PowerBooks, iMacs, etc.) with the same problem?

[DiscarnateCamel]

I did have Parallels installed but without VMs set up (I reinstalled OS X once I first saw the problem because I had had some wonky networking issues with Parallels in the past) but I removed it to see if the network adapters it installed could be the probelm.

Also, I have several co-workers that have MacBook Pros as well and they are experiencing no problems which leads me to believe the problem has to do with my computer.

[mfbernstein]

Well, if you've a firewire cable (and your co-workers are agreeable, and one has an MBP with an up-to-date system), you can have them start their machine in Firewire Target disk mode, connect it to your machine, and have your machine boot off of their machine's system. That should help narrow down whether the issue is hardware or software. While hardware defect is a possibility, this sort of thing is pretty unusual!