I'm just curious if anyone else experiences this problem..

It doesn't seem to matter what web browser I use, but on some web sites.. none in particular (even this one), it will either take a long time for the page to come up or it locks up my browser entirely... but if I switch over to my Windows machine and test it, it displays fine.

I'll use this web site for example... the home page comes up fine, but any other place in the site, it will display the Linuxquestions.org header just fine, then it stops and it takes anywhere from 30secs to a minute for the rest of the page to display... and it says at the bottom.. connecting to www.burstnet.com .... which is obviously something embedded into the code of this site.

I've done a tcpdump when things like this happen, and all I see are ARP packets going back and forth and some DNS traffic.

I'm not running a firewall and I've tried disabling tcp-wrappers by editing my hosts.allow and hosts.deny files and allowing everything through... still the same result.

Any ideas? I've got to either be missing something or don't have something configured right.. I can't believe that there are that (esspecially this site) sites that are taylored for Internet Explorer. Even linux shareware sites like, www.zdnet.com/downloads won't even come up.

run ifconfig and see if it shows any errors

also you may try a different nameserver if there's no errors

when you run tcpdump you will get your machine name.domain.net or whatever in the output


run this


dig domain.net axfr

if that don't work use

dig domain.net

without the axfr

then look for a name starting with ns

if you have one dig that name and get the ip addresses listed


then add them to /etc/resolv.conf one at a time and test it

Similar things happen to me (on various platforms- Win, Mac, Linux) at home and at work, regardless of the browser. My delays aren't as long, but that might be due to the fact that I've got pretty fast connections in both places.

You've already found the clue as to why some (although maybe not all) of this is happening by your mention of burstnet. If you put your mouse over the large ANNOYING blinking banner ad that appears at the top of this site's pages, you'll find that it's a link to an ad sponsored by burstnet.

What's happening is this: when you see your browser stall on an address not related to the site you're visiting, you're not sitting there waiting for the main site to load, you're waiting for an ad from a linked/sponsored site to load, and that loading often wants to complete before the page from the main site displays in full.

Granted, many sites need to link to advertisers to make $$, and that's OK (especially for a site like this), but the major ad sites seem to be *heavily* underpowered, and bog down quite often. Burstnet, Jeeves, and many others are repeat offenders. Ad-blocking software can help the situation, but even they don't do (IMHO) an adequate job.

The congestion is often sporadic, so by the time you've switched over to Win to test the connection, it's quite likely that you *won't* get a "busy signal" at that point, making it appear as though the problem was due to Linux.

One work-around I've found in any browser, on any OS, is to click the browser's stop and then reload buttons at the point when you're hung waiting for info to load from a referenced site. Often, the time it takes to refresh the connection is enough to let your call go through.

As for locking up the browser entirely, that sounds like it could be a separate issue.

Well, not to doubt you guys - but I don't think either one of those are it. DNS isn't the issue here, my name resolution is fine (FYI, both machines use the exact same DNS). I've done hard core networking for years and in response to DMR, although that is a distant possibility, I do not think that it has anything to do with load factor of burstnet.com. I would see delays on Windows systems as well....

It NEVER has a delay on IE machines, but as soon as I hit my Linux machine, I get a delay every single time.. and no reloading does not help. I can reload a page on IE until I'm blue in the face and never get a delay...

Speed of my connection is not the issue either.. I'm running a full T3 here at my house, and able to pull hella-throughput.

None of this is "sporadic" - it is very consistant.... I will always get a delay on the same site (or no web page at all) for the same period of time on my Linux machine.. hell I can hit enter on the same site, at the same time, one being my Linux machine and the other being my Windows machine, and one goes and one doesn't.

I'm 100% sure this is either a Linux issue, or I have a weird ass configuration problem I've never heard of. I know it's not a hardware issue, because I can swap drive and load Windows up on my Linux machine and the problem disappears.

well lets try using the lynx browser. It should be quick due to that is text base and dosent load all that other web cr*p. Also check out your network status. if you get good ping traceroute and DNS response then the problem is not the card or networking. If the networking working layer and below are fine check proxy settings, any IP filters you might have set, and browser configurations. Hope this helps to specify where it might be ...cheers

Yes, I've done all of that.... I have however made some interesting progress..

I went into my web browser and disabled JavaScript - and that pretty much fixed my problem... on this web site at least. But I feel that is not really the solution, since I have Javascript enabled on all my other Windows machines.

And, I'm still not able to connect to another web site I found to have problems with, which is www.zdnet.com/downloads - it never brings up a web page, it just times out.

I have noticed an interesting occurence though while doing traceroutes to these different sites... when ever it reaches somewhere around the 19-21st hop, give or take a hop, it starts timing out.... no responses. . only on my Linux machine.. my Windows machine doesn't get this.. I wonder if the TTL is set to low by default on my Linux machine or something?? There is definitely something weird going on here.

As an added side note, I swapped out my network card, cables.. the whole nine yards.. same result. So it's gotta be some setting..

As an addition - I changed the TTL to 128 - still no change in affect.....?