This evening I discovered that I could not access any websites from Chrome, Firefox, etc. At first I though my router might just need rebooting, but I quickly found that I had no trouble tracerouteing to e.g. google.com.
Furthermore, if I telnet to www.google.com port 80 it connects, and GET / returns a web page. Other machines on the same network have no connectivity problems, so it seems specific to this one Mac.
What is wrong with networking such that Chrome and Firefox refuse to connect, but I can access things fine with command line tool. And how can I fix it?
Update: I get the same ERR_ADDRESS_INVALID when I try to point Chrome to http://74.125.224.193, which is what dnslookup on the same machine gives as one of Google's IP addresses. What exactly does this error mean, since obvious this address is not, in and of itself, "invalid".
Second update: after about 5 minutes, the above address suddenly brings up Google's web page. But I try another web site by IP and it gives the same ERR_ADDRESS_INVALID.
Third update: After about 30 minutes of trying various things I finally gave up and rebooted the machine. This fixed the problem. However, I still would like to know what the problem was, and if it is possible to fix it without rebooting. It seems to be a rather disturbing trend that Mavericks is more prone to needing a reboot than earlier versions of OS X.
Best Answer
This is probably something obvious that you've checked already, but do you have some wierd proxy settings in the OS or the browser?
Failing that, run the Developer Tools in Chrome and look at the 'Network' tab - does that show any redirects or anything? Maybe the browser can connect to the first IP but fails when that sends you elsewhere?