OK people, I need help, and I know that some of you on here have some rue computing knowledge. For the last 48 hours my computer has refused to do anything involving making a secure connection, I can’t log on to MSN, hotmail, my amazon account, my bank or my universitie’s education materials database. I just get a ‘page not found’. Possibly coincidentally, at around the same time as this started my PC states ‘The Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect Driver could not be loaded. Your computer is not protected form viruses. Please reboot.’ everytime i fire it up and the norton logo is crossed out on my system tray. I’ve tried virus checking and running an adware/spyware checker, but to no avail. I have not changed any of my internet settings, or those of my AV, for a long time. This happened around two weeks ago, for about 48 hours, but at the time i assumed that just a couple of sites were down coincidentally, MSN worked but Hotmail, my bank and an online shop i was trying to use didn’t. The problem cleared by itself. Maximum rep points to anyone who can point me in the right direction to getting this fixed, thanks.
If you have the full Norton security suite thing that includes the firewall, that may be blocking port 443 - which is what all of the “https” sites use for SSL connections.
I would start by looking there to see if that’s the problem.
One thing you can try to do is to open a command prompt and try to telnet to a known listening service on 443. eBay should suffice for this test:
telnet signin.ebay.com 443
You should connect and get a blinky cursor. If this fails, then port 443 outgoing is being blocked by some sort of firewall app. Anything you enter will not echo, but if you don’t connect, you should eventually time out and receive a “failed to connect” sort of message.
Good luck.
‘Could not open connection to the host, on port 443: connection failed’ What next? I’m sorry I’m not all that computer literate, windows firewall is off and presumably norton isn’t diong anything if it’s up the creek.
So that’d imply that there’s some sort of firewall that’s preventing the connection. If you have the norton personal firewall installed, try to disable or uninstall it. If you’ve had any other firewalls installed, try to remove them.
But there’s little reason for you not to be able to telnet to port 443 to signin.ebay.com.
It’s fixed, my mate Adam uninstalled the damaged Norton and got me sophos instead, it appears Norton was somehow damaged and was blocking my internet access in some way. Thanks everyone for your help, unicyclists rule.
I’ll take Sophos over Norton any day - hands down - glad it’s fixed 