[PLUG] No Powells

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 08:58:56AM -0800, Vram wrote:
> I am trying to determine why I can't get Powells to come up..
> 
> My browser just times out...
> 
> I hate to say this..  My Other operating system loads Powells just fine.
> 
> So something is happening in Mozilla and Konqueror <both> to stop
> loading this site...

Welcome to the Browser war.  I am not sure what is happening either,
but Something Changed recently, and it has affected many of us over
the past few weeks. 

In my case, the problem was on a recent 2.6 kernel in SUSE 10.0,
and seemed to be involved with DNS, Domain Name Service, the process
that converts internet (dot) names into numeric IP addresses.  I fixed
it by turning off IPV6 in the modprobe process, and I posted about
that a few days ago.  The problem suddenly appeared (for all sites,
not just Powells), a couple of weeks after moving the machine to a
new site, and it may have been due to the eventual change of DNS
cache info caused by the change of ISPs.

It may also be due to some kind of enemy action.  Perhaps there are
things the bad guys can do to DNS transactions that confuse the cache
and linger, causing the problems we have seen.  I don't know enough
about DNS to say.

What distribution and version of Linux, and Mozilla, and Konqueror
are you running?  I can't help directly, but if all of us with
problems report the relevant details, it may help those knowledgable
enough to fix the large scale problem.

In the short term, though, look at the postings regarding browsers 
over the past two weeks and see if they have relevant fixes. 
Warning, there is a bit of a technical argument going on that
doesn't have much to do with fixes; be patient and read past that.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs