network woes

[Trent Shipley]

Somewhere my connection to the Internet is borken.  Load times take
forever.  It doesn't seem to effect the wireless client routers, but I
have had trouble on both the wired machines under Ubuntu 9.10 and
Windows Vista.  Sometimes the Linux machine effectively looses
connectivity with the Internet.  It comes back if I log out of my X
session and log back in ... most of the time.  I have a firewall router,
but effectively no household LAN since I've been too lazy to really
figure out how to configure the Ubuntu desktop machine as a primary
domain controller, then adjust it's firewall to suit.


I'd like an idiot friendly tool to help track this problem down,
preferably on the Linux machine which seems to experience the problem
most consistently.

Baring a GUI tool friendly to mortal users, I am not above using the
@#$% command line and a text editor.


I am not too network savvy.  I have to look up the layers of the OSI
stack every time.  What is a reasonable diagnostic or fault tree for
approaching my symptoms.

It is also worth noting that this problem seems to date back to
precisely when I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10.