most of the time I try to connect to a website, I get a "host not found" error. Sometimes I will be able to connect. For instance my last session I could connect to google, and my own website, but no others that I tried (new york times, espn, theregister.com etc etc) Once I connect to a site, then I seem to be able to navigate around just fine, as long as I continue to connect to the same server. For instance with google, everything works fine, but if I try to follow a link to news.google.com I will get the host not found error. I believe the problem is with elinks, and not a dns issue or the like, because another text based browsers (for example, links), or a regular gui web browser works without error. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. emerge info Portage 2.0.50-r1 (default-x86-1.4, gcc-3.3.2, glibc-2.3.2-r9, 2.4.22-gentoo-r5) ================================================================= System uname: 2.4.22-gentoo-r5 i686 AMD Athlon(TM) XP 2000+ Gentoo Base System version 1.4.3.13 Autoconf: sys-devel/autoconf-2.58-r1 Automake: sys-devel/automake-1.7.7 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="gcc3" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.1/share/config /usr/kde/3.2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache sandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="X alsa apache2 apm arts avi berkdb crypt cups encode foomaticdb gdbm gif gpm gtk2 imap imlib java jpeg kde libg++ libwww mad maildir mikmod mmx motif mpeg mysql ncurses nls oggvorbis opengl oss pam pdflib perl png python qt quicktime readline samba sasl sdl slang spell sse ssl svga tcltk tcpd truetype v4l x86 xml2 xmms xv zlib"
1) Are you using a proxy? 2) On the bottom of the elinks window there a 'status-line' which shows msgs like "Making connection", "Request sent", "Transferring", etc. At which of these states does the page loading stop?
1)I'm not using a proxy. I am behind a lynksys router. But considering that every other browser, from firefox to links works fine (and out of the box) on that machine, I think it has to be an issue with elinks. 2) Today I'm not able to hit any websites at all. If I type "g" to bring up the "go to url" window, then enter a url, (e.g. http://google.com) there is a brief flash of the words "Looking up host" followed 1/4 second later with "Error Host not found". As I said, doing the exact same procedure with links works fine. thanks, Cedar
Ok, here's an idea of what to do. Install a packet sniffer like tcpdump or ethereal. Make sure no confidental informations are transferred to/from your computer when you'll be using the sniffer. It would be best if you could stop all other unnecessary traffic (fetchmail, irc, p2p programs, etc). Then start the sniffer and make sure the promiscuous mode is _disabled_. After you have started the sniffer, go to your console and start elinks. Try to visit one or two pages. Then end your sniffing session and save the results in a sane format (tcpdump's format will do fine). Then repeat those steps for a different browser (links, mozilla, whatever). And finally send me the two saved files for analysis. I hope to be able to either find some differences between how elinks and <any browser> tries to load a webpage or reproduce the problem here, on my computer. Please remember that it's important you make sure no confidental data like passwords, personal conversations is transferred at the time you will be making the traffic-snapshots. Thanks in advance for your work on this issue :)
might take me a day or two to get to that, but I will.
Great, I hope it gets us somewhere. I'll be AFK 11th - 14th Mar, so please be patient ;)
Ok, I'm back. Any progress on this one?
Created attachment 27352 [details] tcpdump- links session
Created attachment 27353 [details] tcpdump- elinks session
OK, I attached a links session and and elinks session in the tcpdump format. Links session: went to google, then nyt.com worked fine Elinks session: went to google and it worked, then tried nyt.com, seattlepi.com, espn.com all gave the "host not found error" hope that helps, Cedar
Do you have the 'async_dns' option enabled in your elinks config file? Could you change this option's state (ie. enable it if it's disabled and disable it if it's enabled) and check if this changes anything?
just to be clear, my config file was totally default, I hadn't modified it at all. Anytway, async_dns was set to 1 by default, and changing that to 0 caused the problem to disapear. Everything is working super now. Thanks! Mind explaining what was going on, and whose fault it is? thanks, Cedar
Well, when the async_dns option is enabled every time you want to load a page a separate thread is started for the DNS query. When it's disabled, the queries are done from the main browser thread. async_dns is enabled by default in both elinks and links (AFAIK). For some reason the async dns queries in elinks didn't work for you, I don't know why exactly as I was not able to reproduce this problem on my system. Do you have async_dns enabled in links? If you do, and it works, you might consider reporting a bug about async_dns to the elinks authors. Perhaps they will be able to find and fix it then.
Ok, I'm closing this one as there isn't much more that can be done about it.
