You say you can ping addresses - numeric or DNS names? It's possible that DNS is upset somehow (maybe the router isn't forwarding your lookups).

eg, try ping empegbbs.com and see if it resolves correctly.

One really useful service that demon internet still have hanging around from 10+ years ago is "finger <address>@158.152.1.65" which does DNS lookups and returns the result as text. Great if DNS is broken and you're trying to find an IP address - you only have to remember the one!

Hugo