Shoutbox

At work today I came across a problem I was unable to resolve,
I set up the nice lady's modem then connected it to her computer, the modem passed all it's diagnostics and I was able to ping/tracert any site on the internet; yet what ever site I tried to connect to displayed an error 404, and it happened on an array of computers, including my macbook, and when I booted the machine into ubuntu

Sounds like DNS.

When you say you could ping sites, was that via IP or domain?

Is it a modem plugged directly into the computer or a router/modem?  If so is it a DHCP network or static?

try surfing to:
3639556968
If you get google, it's a DNS problem...

The "user friendly" error messages, particularly from IE, can make it hard to tell what's really going on.  However, if he in fact got 404 (HTTP "not found") errors, that wouldn't be DNS -- you have to successfully reach a server to get the error. 

The only thing that I can think of that could cause this on multiple computers would be a failure at a transparent proxy. 

when I say I could ping/tracert google.com, I could ping/tracert "google.com" I was using the domain name and it was returning an IP address, I tried IE using the IP address also; and it didn't work. I didn't try 3639556968, but I think it was a bit more tricky than that. the modem had a dns query in it's tests which passed and I also tried using google's DNS 8.8.8.8 but I still couldn't get it to work.