In the morning, I reset my router because I wanted to know if it was causing Daryna's (Linux Mint) Static IP addressing to go haywire. Figures that it had nothing to do.

However, I had to reconfigure my router, and made a huge blunder. Somewhere, I forwarded port 81 and 82. At first I got no issues, but troubles soon came.

I wanted to check my mail, and saw that I could not access my Hotmail account. Nothing from the Live domain worked, even msn and Microsoft's site. Weird. Digg didn't work too. However, other sites worked normally.

I thought Hotmail was down or something, maybe the DNS servers in Mauritius got some problems, but nothing. Neelesh said Hotmail was up and running, and there was no mention of MSN/Live servers having any trouble. That meant the problem was on my side.

I searched like mad, checking my routing tables, pinging addresses, netstat, virus scan and whatever I could think of. Nothing.

The funniest thing is that, even Daryna could not access Hotmail. Meaning it was not OS related. I then turned towards my router. I changed settings. Nothing.

Then I noticed the 2 forwarded ports, 81 and 82. I suspected that this might be the problem, since 80 is for HTTP traffic. I deleted the forwards, and tada! I could access everything again.

Moral of the story: Never forward ports you are not sure of. That holds for ports less than 10000. These are especially important. It's a lesson learnt for me.