On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, David Benfell wrote:
On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 12:27:51PM +0100, Dave Smith wrote:
On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 01:23:27PM +0200, s.akhtary@teraport.se wrote:
I have installed SuSE one one of my computers and have problem accessing some web sites such as www.sun.com and www.alltheweb.com. I have tried with netscape, Konqueror. lynx and telnet. [snip] This means that the networking services work and the computer can resolve names to IP and I have a contact to the Internet. I do not understand this feature / bug and would appreciate if someone could help me with some suggestions :-)
Are you sure it's not an ISP routing problem?
This is the right question. Please try: /snip/ dig and traceroute suggested.
This sounds suspiciously like a problem I was having with support.hp.com a month or so ago. As it turned out, I had been trying to 'optimize' my ppp link to my ISP, and I had changed ppp.options to force an MTU smaller than the 1500 byte default. I had read that smaller MTU was more efficient on slower links. What I discovered was that some firewall designers have decided that the ICMP protocol is 'evil', probably because they once heard about flood-pinging DoS attacks. So they block all ICMP in their firewall. And the result is that 'path MTU discovery', which is a part of the REQUIRED set of IP protocols, breaks. The symptoms I saw were connection to the host, but just hanging as soon as the data began to transfer. I could get some pages, but not others. What was happening was that my pppd had negotiated an MTU with its peer, so whenever a larger packet got sent, it was rejected with a 'please fragment' request, which was summarily bit-bucketed by the overly-paranoid firewall. When I set my MTU back to the default 1500, I could again browse the HP and other sites which had been causing me problems. -- Rick Green "I have the heart of a little child, and the brain of a genius. ... and I keep them in a jar under my bed"