Chrome and Safari can browse the internet, but ping and other command-line tools can't

I'm using Mac OS X 10.6, and the problem appeared after the latest update.

Chrome and Safari can browse the Internet fine, but I can't ping google.com or apple.com. I have also found that bzr fails, but git works for some reason.

I thought it might be an IPv6 issue, so I tried disabling IPv6 on all the interfaces I could, but the problem continued.

I have no idea what might be causing this. Thanks for any help you can give!

Edit:

ifconfig produces

lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
    inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
    inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
    inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
gif0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1280
stf0: flags=0<> mtu 1280
en0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    ether 00:25:00:a9:93:9e 
    inet6 fe80::225:ff:fea9:939e%en0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4 
    inet 165.82.76.128 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 165.82.76.255
    media: autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
    status: active
fw0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 4078
    lladdr 00:25:00:ff:fe:a9:93:9e 
    media: autoselect <full-duplex>
    status: inactive
en1: flags=8823<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    ether 00:24:36:af:45:d4 
    media: autoselect (<unknown type>)
    status: inactive
en2: flags=8963<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    ether 00:1c:42:00:00:08 
    inet6 fe80::21c:42ff:fe00:8%en2 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x7 
    inet 10.211.55.2 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.211.55.255
    media: autoselect
    status: active
en3: flags=8963<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    ether 00:1c:42:00:00:09 
    inet6 fe80::21c:42ff:fe00:9%en3 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x8 
    inet 10.37.129.2 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.37.129.255
    media: autoselect
    status: active

And ipfw list produces

65535 allow ip from any to any

Noah Lavine

Posted 2010-11-29T16:44:49.973

Reputation: 113

3Do you have an outgoing firewall installed? If so check it's not blocking these commands. – ChrisF – 2010-11-29T16:51:40.207

Did you recently change nicks ChrisF? – RobotHumans – 2010-11-29T18:00:25.663

What error do you get when you try to ping google.com? – Gordon Davisson – 2010-11-29T18:31:41.823

When I do ping google.com I don't get an error, I just get a series of lost packets. However, when I do bzr pull in a repository, I get "Connection error: while sending POST ...: [Errno 51] Network is unreachable". – Noah Lavine – 2010-11-29T19:32:27.680

What does the output of ifconfig and ipfw list look like? (you may need to prepend sudo to each) – Zayne S Halsall – 2010-11-29T20:14:02.150

@Zayne - I'll put that in an edit because it's quite long. – Noah Lavine – 2010-11-29T22:22:22.133

Would you mind sharing the output of the ping command that you get? Also, are you able to browse on Firefox, if you have that? I am asking because both Chrome and Safari use the system-wide proxy settings, while Firefox has its own proxy settings configuration utility. – ayaz – 2010-11-30T10:07:10.660

@ChrisF - you're right. I got in touch with the people who manage our LAN, and it looks like ping and bzr are both blocked. Thanks to everyone for your generous help. – Noah Lavine – 2010-11-30T19:37:05.600

also, you might want to check out apple.stackexchange.com. – Robert S Ciaccio – 2010-11-29T22:42:12.227

I'm not connected to a VPN, but I am on my school's network, which might have a filter on it. I will check on that. – Noah Lavine – 2010-11-30T01:54:34.650

en2 and en3 are from Parallels virtualization software. Making them inactive didn't fix the issue. – Noah Lavine – 2010-11-30T01:55:06.867

if you look in your proxy settings for en0, is there anything there? Got to system preferences --> advanced --> proxies – Robert S Ciaccio – 2010-11-30T02:00:23.023

Chrome and Safari can browse the internet, but ping and other command-line tools can't

Answers