there's some weird stuff going on here (Firefox related)
 

After a power outage and a hard system crash, firefox has started acting weird. I have a Debian sarge system with firefox. It kind of acts like it cant find a dns server or something. Firefox can't find my home page or any of my bookmarks, sometimes I can type in a link and it works fine other times not at all. Firefox just sits there like its trying to find the url, then finally times out. I can ping sites from the bash that time out connecting from firefox. Konqueror, Opera, Lynx, Mozilla all work fine. Even the Gmail notifier extension won't connect.

I noticed i was running firefox 1.0.5 so i upgraded to 1.0.7 hoping that would fix it, but no luck.

Anyone have any ideas?

How's the internet explorer.. just out of the curiousity...

Is internet explorer working fine?

edit: Feelgood beat me to it :)

as far as i know, Microsoft hasn't released an internet explorer for Linux yet. This is on a debian sarge system.

cat /etc/network/interfaces
cat /etc/resolv.conf

I believe those paths are correct. Make sure that the network interface and DNS server are set up right in them.

I think you have lost DNS.
If you enter an ip does it find it?

Do you know how to clear out your profile, create a new one, and transfer the safe files to the new one? I can lead you along if you aren't familiar with the process.

it really does seem like i have lost dns, but only for firefox which is what i find perplexing. And it is the same for all users, Konqueror, Mozilla, Galeon, Opera all work fine no Firefox. I can ping by url, not just ip, which is usually a test of dns.

Redlemon, I don't know how to do that but it seems like an idea. I guess I'll try creating a new user and see if the new user can get firefox to work.

LMAO :)

I assume then that you've been able to browse websites by going to http://whatvertheIPofthewebsiteis via firefox? I mean, I guess you could call that "pinging".

Since your DNS is obviously working, it's apparent that soemthing is wrong with the way that firefox handles the DNS. Perhaps there is something in about:config that might help. Poke through there a bit.

nope, by pinging i mean opening a bash shell and typing
ping www.google.com

and it works fine, good response times and no dropped packets.

I'm not too familiar with linux, do you have any tools that can translate a domain name to an IP address?

Ping will do that too, it looks up the ip address then pings the ip address.
you can do the same thing from a dos prompt in windows. And something is definitely messed up with my dns. If i enter an ip address for a website that times out when i try to access it by url, it works fine. I can't figure out what the difference is, the DNS settings are the same for both that machine and my laptop which works fine. I also have no idea this would only affect firefox.

i hate computer problems i cant solve! :crazy:

TheFez, how about (temporarily) nuking your FireFox prefs, extensions, etc. - make a backup for your ~/.mozilla folder or whatever and then try starting up FF so it should be like "clean install". It's possible that an extension is causing problems, when extensions misbehave I've seen them cause strange strange errors.

OK, I can walk you through it. It is pretty much what Pragma just said. Check out the link Firefox Help: How To Manage Profiles. Instead of the last step, use this graphic as a guide to what files can be copied back:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...cleanup9dv.png

(The graphic is from Windows, but is still applicable to Linux.)