problem with fc2 and firefox

[Mark Eggers]

I am assuming that you never get connected to the remote web host after
seeing "resolving host . . . ."?

I am using FireFox 0.9 on FC 2 with the latest kernel.  I am not
experiencing your difficulties.

Here are some questions:

1. Do you have difficulties in resolving hosts using dig?

Try dig <hostname> from the command line, where <hostname> is the name
of the host you're trying to get to.

If you get an answer with something like the following,

; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 9509
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 0

DNS resolution is set up correctly.

2. Make sure your proxies are set up correctly.  The location has
changed in FireFox 0.9.  You'll find the information in:

Edit-->Preferences-->General-->Connection Settings

In particular, if you are using a proxy host by name, make sure that you
can resolve the name to an IP address (check using dig as in step 1).

If you are having trouble with host name resolution, you'll need to look
at the following two files.

a) /etc/resolv.conf
b) /etc/nsswitch.conf

The first file tells your system what name server to use for name - IP
address resolution.  It can be as simple as:

nameserver <ip_address>

where <ip_address> is the numeric address of your name server.

The second file is a bit more complex, but not very difficult to
understand.  With the advent of NIS, DNS, Hesiod, and other name -
number resolution schemes, the nsswitch.conf file came about in order to
make some order out of this mess.

Basically, each name - number translation is followed by a set of
methods to try.  The first service to match a name with a number (user
to uid, group to gid, host name to IP, etc.) wins.

The service order is determined by the order in the file.  For example,
a line for hosts follows:

hosts:     db files nisplus nis dns

This means try local db files first, followed by flat files, followed by
nisplus (nis+), followed by nis, and finally DNS.

If you get an answer from files that is different (and possibly wrong)
from DNS, you'll never know since as soon as an answer is found it is
returned.

The trick is to make sure that the authoritative service is queried
first.  Since I don't run nis+ or nis for host resolution, I have the
following in my nsswitch.conf file.

hosts:      dns files

Since I run a local caching name service on this machine, I have the
following in my resolv.conf file.

nameserver 0.0.0.0
nameserver 192.168.1.2

With this, I am certain to get the authoritative answer first for hosts
I do not control - provided DNS is available and has not been attacked.

I hope this helps.

/mde/
just my two cents . . . .