A few weeks ago I had problems with my connection to the internet. My connection had been rock solid for a year and a half, but my first inclination was to blame my provider. I quickly discovered it was to do with Firefox. I found a solution, which was to delete some file, but unfortunately in the urgency to get Firefox going again, I neglected to record it.
About a week ago I reinstalled Firefox to version 2.0.0.1, with an excellent script which can be found on Ubuntu Linux Resources. Everything seemed to be faster and I was happy as a pig in flight until yesterday, when Firefox started acting up again.
Unfortunately, like the first time, I was so anxious to get it going again that I didn’t keep a note of where I found the solutions, so apologies to the solution providers. It was on the Unbuntu Forums but now I can’t find it.
Anyway, here are a few things I tried. There is disagreement about the presence of IPv6*, but apparently it works for some and not for others.
Here is this solution: where you normally type a url, type about:config
and press enter.
In the same place, typeIPv6. Two lines will appear. Where it says
network.dns.disableIPv6, double click on that line to turn the value to True.
It didn’t work for me, but I’ll leave it off in case it’s part of the solution.
The next solution was to open the terminal and type sudo pppoeconf
Terminal will ask for your password and then a colourful window will appear and you click yes to let it test your connections.
That wasn’t successful for me either.
What worked is this:
Again in the terminal, type sudo dhclient
as in
me@my-laptop:~$ sudo dhclient
This is the result I got:
There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.pid with pid 7890
killed old client process, removed PID file
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.4
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/Listening on LPF/eth0/00:c0:9f:47:b5:a7
Sending on LPF/eth0/00:c0:9f:47:b5:a7
Listening on LPF/eth1/00:0e:35:3e:2a:a8
Sending on LPF/eth1/00:0e:35:3e:2a:a8
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPREQUEST on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPREQUEST on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPREQUEST on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 192.168.1.1
bound to 192.168.1.33 — renewal in 102280 seconds.
So, a second ‘client process’ was the culprit. I tried Google, and I was back.
Unfortunately, I had the same problem when I logged on this morning, so it’s not a permanent solution. Going through the above process got me back, but I’m still not sure how to make this solution permanent. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.
Note: I wasn’t previously aware of Network Tools in System/Admin/Network Tools. You might find it useful in sorting out such problems.
