Google Reader malfunctioning; possibly router?

Question

I can open Google Reader without difficulty.

As soon as I move onto the second item, I get the message:

"Oops...and error occurred. Please try again in a few seconds."

This occurs on both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (up-to-the-minute versions) on my Ubuntu laptop, as well as on Firefox and Safari on OS X on my home network.

Connecting to a different wireless network (say, at the local coffee shop), and it works perfectly; no configuration changes required. Returning to my home network sees the problem return.

The only thing I can think of is either a router issue or an ISP issue. How would I trouble shoot this at the router level?

Answer 1

It sounds like either a routing issue or possibly a DNS failure. Either problem could affect your home network but not the coffeeshop's. You could also be running into MTU issues, but I can't give you any offhand advice for diagnosing those.

To troubleshoot further, you'd need to know what servers Google Reader is trying to communicate with.

Once you figure that out, you can use tools like ping, tracert (on Windows) or traceroute (on Linux), and nslookup (on Windows) or dig (on Linux) to figure out whether the trouble is in the routing or in the DNS.

If it's a DNS issue, you could try pointing your router to OpenDNS instead of the ISP's DNS servers. If it's a routing issue, contact the ISP -- there's nothing you can do.

Answer 2

I had problems with using Google Reader from my office which were solved by using the HTTPS link:

https://www.google.com/reader/

This won't help you troubleshoot the problem but could be an acceptable workaround while you do.