Only certain website functionality working on a site

[pollocktown4]

This is going to seem strange; at least this is the first time I've seen this. I'm not even sure where to categorize this. I'm going to give you the entire play-by-play in hopes that it helps…

I frequent ancestry.com on a regular basis, and one morning, nothing is working on the site. The site appears to load fine, but I cannot click on anything. I tried a different browser (I normally use chrome) and same thing. I grab my wife's computer, and it does the same thing. I figured that they must have applied an update and it was down. The next morning it was still not working, so I went to a different computer on a different network and it worked. At this point, I'm thinking that something with my windows 10 machines are flaky, but for kicks, I decide to bypass my PFSense box, and connect to my phone's hotspot. To my surprise I could now access the site normally through my phone's network! To eliminate my ISP, I took my laptop directly off my cable modem, and it worked great. I then plug back in through my PFSense box, and the site functionality stops working.

Now I have narrowed down the issue to be with my PFSense box, here's what I have done with my PFSense short of a complete re-install. I eventually uninstalled the squid+squidguard combo, after checking and doublechecking settings; did not work. I then updated PFSense to the latest version; did not work. I reinstalled squid+squidguard on the new version; did not work.

I'm now wondering if there's anything else I can do to find out what could possibly be going on. Does anyone have any ideas to help a PF Sense newbie??

[divsys]

From a troubleshooting POV it's probably worth a reinstall from scratch without Squid.

If that doesn't help, you might have an MTU issue.

[pollocktown4]

@divsys:

If that doesn't help, you might have an MTU issue.

For what it was worth, I just tried adjusting and playing with different MTU settings to no avail. I figured that would be easier to test before a complete reload from scratch.

I hate the thought of giving up on finding the solution before a reinstall from scratch, but if I have to, I will. I have another friend behind a pfsense firewall test the site at his house, and it works fine.

Any other last minute suggestions to try before I give up??

[divsys]

What's your time worth?

I know the feeling: "but I'm sure I can figure this out!"
You have to ask yourself what do you gain in potential knowledge vs. time lost thrashing out a problem.

For me it's a hard learned lesson to manage my problems back to a known good point (reload from scratch) and work forward.
Just too many uncontrollable variables working with computers, and a weird intermittent problem is a sure sign of "There something here I'm missing"

My instincts say: Apply the KISS principle, Reload a very basic setup and move forward.

Just my $.02

[pollocktown4]

…something to do with DNS. I will be combing through all my DNS settings in great detail within the next few days. In the meantime, a quick fix was to set my pc DNS to 8.8.8.8 as a band-aid. The source of my problem has been pin pointed and temped until further resolution. Thanks for the suggestions earlier...