Notices

OK. I've had a history of minor issues with both my ISP's DNS servers and my router's dns proxy, which is why I configure all my boxes to use the dnsmasq server on my NAS. Neither of these worked with my N900, giving symptoms the same as yours, so as a last resort i used the upstream DNS. The historical issues I've had led me to not investigate further, but at least two others have had joy with this workaround. Hope that helps your understanding

fnordianslip, I do appreciate the suggestion, sorry if it sounded like I was ungrateful!

It's just as a journalist I'm more interested in finding out whether there's a general problem with the N900 and/or Nokia and/or Akamai, rather than just fixing it on my particular unit.

weird, this shows that dns is working.
can you ping the server (with ip and servername)
what happens if you try to access the server with web browser (should get access denied)
what happens with apt-get update
and finally what happens with app manager

Pinging, I need root permissions. I've never bothered getting these so could someone give a simple way to do this on the N900?

By the way I don't know if this is any use, I pinged it on my Windows PC and it showed this:


Pinging downloads.maemo.nokia.com [193.184.164.144] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 193.184.164.144: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=62
Reply from 193.184.164.144: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=62
Reply from 193.184.164.144: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=62
Reply from 193.184.164.144: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=62

Ping statistics for 193.184.164.144:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 14ms, Maximum = 20ms, Average = 16ms


N900 browser, I get access denied.

Apt-get update... not 100% sure what this means. Again, if you could say a simple way to do this I'll do it.

N900 app manager it just times out like it always has.

Actually this is enough. Or you could copy&paste the log from app manager to see exactly what's going on there.

The can be accessed (sort of) from browser, but not from app manager. Seems strange. Any chance that there are any proxies involved? Not that it should affect anything here.

I'm not using any proxies, if that's what you mean?

Could this be anything to do with it:

http://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/ on N900 browser gives me the access denied page

https://downloads.maemo.nokia.com/ on N900 browser gives me a "secure connection failed" error (ssl_error_bad_cert_domain).

The App Manager uses the https address, not the http one.

yes, that's what I meant

btw, here's one old akamai related bug report if the journalist in you is interested https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3823
(some days ago I saw a message that somebody couldn't access the repos from Iran)

The error also says "The certificate is only valid for a248.e.akamai.net"

I think that it's same message as with your pc and it happens for me too. Log from app manager would be important