Unable to connect to websites which don't start with www

Question

I have created hotspot from my Andriod mobile and using Internet on laptop Windows 7 but I'm unable to connect to websites which don't start with www..

The error:

If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web

Should the settings be done on mobile or laptop? What should I change?

Note I am using mobile data. Websites starting with www. are working fine. The problem doesn't occur on my phone. Also everything is OK when my laptop uses LAN.

Broadcom 4313GN 802.11b/g/n 1x1 Wi-Fi Adapter network

Answer 1

1)Go Wireless Network connections Status.

2)Properties

3)Networking

4)Configure

After doing this there was error DHCP not there , I gave auto fix in windows. And all websites started working.

Answer 2

What happens if you don't use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), but, instead use an IP address in the browser? An example you could use would be http://208.80.154.224/. What you should see is a message stating:

Domain not configured

This domain points to a Wikimedia Foundation server, but is not configured on this server

Then what happens if you do use an FQDN for a website at that address, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/?

I've found it to be helpful sometimes when weird things like you are experiencing occur to check on what happens when I try connecting to a website using a telnet client rather than from a web browser. Sometimes that has helped me isolate the source of the problem. You can install a telnet client Microsoft provides or install the free PuTTY telnet/SSH client and then use PuTTY to connect to a website and issue a command that a browser would issue.

If you use Microsoft's telnet client, open a command prompt window then issue the command telnet example.com 80 (you can, of course, substitute any FQDN for a webserver of your choosing, instead of example.com). If you use example.com, type the following lines when connected hitting Enter once after typing the first line and twice after typing the second line. Note: you won't see anything from the web server when you connect to port 80 until you've entered the commands. You won't even see what you typed echoed back to you using the Microsoft client.

HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

The HEAD method requests information from the server, "HTTP/1.1" specifies that you wish to use version 1.1 of the HTTP protocol which supports specifying a host name, which is needed for servers hosting multiple websites. The "Host" line specifies the particular website you wish to access. You could use HEAD / HTTP/1.0 and omit the "Host:" line, but for servers hosting multiple sites, the "host:" line is the mechanism for browsers to identify the particular website they wish to access.

You should then see output similar to the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Content-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=604800
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:11:44 GMT
Etag: "359670651+gzip"
Expires: Tue, 21 Mar 2017 18:11:44 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 23:54:35 GMT
Server: ECS (iad/182A)
X-Cache: HIT 
Content-Length: 606

I don't know if you will get different results, i.e., be able to access sites without "www", attempting to access websites by that method rather than through a browser, but, I've found differing results sometimes, e.g., when a Windows system was infected with malware affecting access to sites via browsers on the system, though I wouldn't think malware would be the cause in your case, since the problem doesn't occur when you are using a LAN connection.

Another tool that can be helpful when troubleshooting connections to websites is Nir Sofer's free HTTPNetworkSniffer utility, which will allow you to observe traffic between web browsers on a Windows system and websites (example of data displayed by HTTPNetworkSniffer).

Answer 3

(Sorry. This is not really an answer but a long comment and a bunch of random guesses and suggestions. I hope it helps anyway.)

Reading all the answers and comments (due to the lack of more detailed troubleshooting data, it's a shot in the dark, but here it goes...) it sounds like you have a 'firewall/VPN' setup either on your phone or on your laptop that has this arbitrary rule blocking HTTP traffic directed at non-www hostnames.

On your phone, it might be something like a mock-VPN-creating app (assuming your phone isn't rooted) e.g. NoRoot Firewall. They seem to be capable of selectively filtering hotspot traffic only. Suggestions:

• Check you VPN settings on your Android device

• Go through the installed apps to see if there is anything like a firewall or a general Internet security app.

• In system settings, you might be able to find a list of these apps in VPN settings or a list of apps that are granted VPN creation privileges.

Failing that, on your laptop, there must be (again, I'm guessing) a security product (well, there are a lot of those for Windows) that is heavily blocking your WiFi interface (hence it is fine when using LAN). Suggestions:

• Disable Windows firewall temporarily to see if that fixes the issue. If so, go through its settings. (Not sure if it is possible setting up this kind of filter, but it's worth eliminating it)

• Go through the security products (firewalls, VPN products, antivirus) installed on your laptop and disable them temporarily or check their settings.

• Use a network analysis tool to figure out what might be happening (quick googling, found this: http://www.colasoft.com/capsa-free/ Looks like it might help but be warned that I never used it myself so use it at your own risk)

I hope it helps. Good luck.