Firefox and Thunderbird stop resolving hosts

luksedj · n00b Joined: 10 Jan 2006 Posts: 3

Hi,

since my update of world yesterday, both firefox and thunderbird stopped trying to resolve hostnames. I can use them with ip addresses, everything works.

When using hostnames i get the box 'www.example.com could not be found'. With TCPdump is don't see any attempt to resolve the hostname. Any other application has no problem resolving hostnames (gaim, ssh, ping, telnet, links,...)

Normally i update on daily basis, but now it has been 14 days or so. In the latest update was the latest gtk and glib and a bunch of others, which don't seem to have much to do with firefox.
i had to unmerge cairo and openmotif before the update wanted to start. After the update a ran revdep-rebuild, once for the new libexif, and once again for everything. Nothing special there.

Has anybody got any suggestions at all? They would be greatly appreciated, as i have already googled a lot.

An interesting thing maybe: on mozillazine.org there is an article which tries to solve the exact same problem, but there the only suggestions are problems with firewalls (which are not present on my laptop) and windooz-settings. Most suggestions are 're-start, re-install, etc...' I have already rebuilt firefox and glib, without any succes.

thx for helping me out of this!

luksedj

neilhwatson · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 719 Location: Canada

Cat you resolve hosts via the command line using dig?
_________________
The true guru is a teacher.
Neil Watson

luksedj · n00b Joined: 10 Jan 2006 Posts: 3

yes i can resolve anything on the command line

luksedj

neilhwatson · l33t Joined: 06 Feb 2003 Posts: 719 Location: Canada

Try clearing the browser cache. Also, make sure the browser's setting are correct.
_________________
The true guru is a teacher.
Neil Watson

luksedj · n00b Joined: 10 Jan 2006 Posts: 3

Thx for the tips, but none of them helped, as I already expected. The browser cache has nothing to do with thunderbird not trying to resolv the addresses of the pop mailservers.

Really weird...

Luksedj

Cintra · Advocate Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 2111 Location: Norway

Hei
I've been using kmail for ever and thought I would take a look at Thunderbird today.. some compile for a mail client!

Anyway, I set it up OK, and downloaded a bunch of mail, however, I'm used to clicking on urls in messages and being taken to the site by the default browser - with thunderbird nothing happens other than the url being shown at the foot of the browser.

I am getting so mad with this, I could spit! grrr!!
Anyone, pls help my blood pressure - where the heck can I enable this?
_________________
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" W.S.

Sull · n00b Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 25

Well after a phew day of uptime my linux stop resolving host of some site,
making him posible on command line but completely slowing if not stoping firefox webpages.

It caused by the nscd service who save DNS information. Try to get it restart or stopped completely.

Cintra · Advocate Joined: 03 Apr 2004 Posts: 2111 Location: Norway

thanks for the tip, but I'm not running nscd here.. I can live without Thunderbird, but it was frustrating to see no mention at all, anywhere, about accessing urls in messages, on any of the faqs, knowledgebases, etc.
mvh

edit: incredible.. found a solution from last august - just add the following to prefs.js

des09

dezydery · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 23 Jul 2004 Posts: 87

I have the same problem. After some hours or days, Firefox can no longer resolve DNS and I can't get any more sites until I restart Firefox. System and network definitely fine, it's just Firefox. It's possible (not sure) that it slows down before actually stopping. I'm much more likely to see this problem if I use Google Maps, but in most browsing sessions I don't use that site and still have a problem.

Firefox 1.5.0.4 (but seen in for a good while in the 1.5 series)

bmeagle · n00b Joined: 30 Nov 2005 Posts: 56 Location: South Africa

I experienced the same problem with firefox 1.5.0.4 after doing a emerge -DN world, I could dig or ping anything but firefox was down, I wasn't running nscd.
I started nscd, restarted firefox and all was well again. Weird!?!
Why does firefox now suddenly require the nscd daemon for resolving?

dezydery · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 23 Jul 2004 Posts: 87

I don't know what nscd is but on my system it's not currently running and not set to start up at boot.

Also, this nscd thing doesn't easily explain why my Firefox itself is good after a restart - so maybe we have different flavours of the problem...