Can someone help me figure out why my Slackware box is blocking access to Google, Blogger, Orkut and the entire Google family?

I have been using Slackware since 10.1 and now use 12.0 since the release date. I have access to the Internet through a wifi router that serves my Slackware box and sometimes a Palm handheld. I've had this router for 2 years.

But only this week I began to have this problem. I wake up in the morning and none of the above mentioned sites work, as if the sites were down or otherwise inaccessible. After a lot of struggling, I just give up. After 2 or 3 hours, the sites are working again.

The problem has occurred always in the morning, when the computer has been left on and idle for a few hours. But it's beginning to happen during the day too.

Rebooting the machine fixes the problem sometimes, not always. Yesterday I had to reboot twice to get it working again.

If I boot into Windows, I can access those sites normally. What is worse is that even having Slackware running and being completely unable to access those sites, my Palm handheld can access them through the very same wifi router, so I have discarded problems with the router. Besides, other sites work normally. I can also check my mail, use MSN, IRC etc. Only that family of Google sites won't work.

Does anyone have any clear idea of what is going on?

No clear idea, but 'ping' only shows you can send and receive ICMP messages, and 'nslookup' or 'dig' only show you can access a DNS server to resolve the address. Three hours is a long time and rebooting shouldn't be necessary unless it's something like not returning from death (hibernation?). Only thing I can suggest is to review your networking configuration and any tweaks you've done, see if restarting the network connection (look for wireless tools output) and related services works (any firewalling, reactive IDS or caching going on?), check syslogs. Running diagnostics like 'tcptraceroute' against the website address and port TCP/80 only works at the time the problem occurs, AFAIK.

Here I am with this same problem again. Absolutely no idea of what to do... :-(

Delete all your browser cache, it's a reach but I have seen this on MS boxes.

All of my browsers? Firefox, Konqueror, Opera, Dillo and links?

Know what I mean?

Even wget won't access those sites. It's really system-wide.

OK, what does your /etc/hosts have in it?

That's OK, what about your ISP (Internet Service Provider)

What about my ISP? I don't know what you mean.

Here it is again. I can't access Google, Blogger, GMail and now also one of my e-mail accounts' SMTP. This has been happening almost every day and 2 or 3 times a day.

Does anyone else find it amazing that no one seems able to figure out what this problem could be in an open source operating system?

This sounds amazing. I want to sticky this thread until you find a solution, do you know how?

Maybe if you actually tell us something other than "it doesn't work" you might get some help. unSpawn gave you a ton of relevant suggestions. Have you attempted to follow any of his ideas? Have you attempted to do anything at all except reboot until it works? As a long-time Slackware user, I'm very confident this isn't something with the base system, but almost certainly it is due to some change you've made to the system recently. Look in your logs, check your firewall, post some details. Since none of us can see your computer, our ability to help is completely and totally dependent on what you provide us.

Ditto--No Linux that I have ever used would start blocking certain sites. Surely something has been done to cause this.

Without re-reading the whole thread, I don't recall if you tried simply re-installing.

What other information do you think would be useful? I was expecting to be asked questions, but that was the reason of my rant: nobody asks anything specific. Those that did got an answer from me and never came back. That can only lead me to believe that no one has the faintest idea what is going on with my Internet connection. Worse: no one seems to know where to start looking. How come no one suggests anything?


I hate to sound ungrateful, but I didn't find his comment that useful. He kind of sort of says what I was doing wrong. But doesn't say much about what I should do right. He is remarkably vague:

Yes, but HOW? Where to look? That is what I would love to hear. I haven't done any tweaks. I hate to touch a system that is working fine, I certainly would remember anything I might have done and caused the problem.

How do I "restart the network connection"? What are "related services" supposed to mean? Am I the only one being vague here? Isn't it reasonable to assume that I would have taken all of these measures if I only knew what he was talking about? Hasn't it become sort of a cliché (one of Eric Raymond's favorites) to instantly accuse the one who is asking for help of not providing enough information? Is it ever taken into consideration that the one who is asking for help might not be able to get by himself precisely for not having enough information to move on?

And I have abandoned the wireless mode because of another problem I have that might be related or not. Now I use an ethernet cable, and the problem remains. So the context has changed and that particular piece of advice is not relevant anymore. That is nowhere near unSpawn's fault, but must be taken into account as the debate evolves.

I would like to do that, but the only log I know is /var/log/messages and it hasn't told me anything useful. I do not use a firewall. My router has an integrated firewall, but I can use the wifi connection with a wireless hadheld device without any problem. This is just affecting my desktop, whatever it is.


pixellany, I tried re-installing this weekend on a separate hard disk. This time, Slackware 12.1. I hated it. The fonts and QT widgets don't look quite the same despite my copying my entire home directory to the new installation, wifi doesn't work out of the box in Slackware, installing madwifi is annoying and I would still have to install several applications that I really need and all that is very time consuming. The weekend was not enough. I can't afford this trouble now. This is a production machine that I took a long time to adjust and I have work to do. I don't want to ditch the current system. It was perfect and sweet until problem kicked in.

Since this is an open source system, I was hoping someone would have a clue about where to look for the cause of the problem. I don't want another system, I want the one I have to work as expected again.

Sorry, I guess I assumed that if you've been using Slackware that long, you've got some pretty significant experience in using it and didn't need the size in millimeters.


To be honest, I have my doubts that this is a Slackware problem. What I (and pixellany I believe) were saying is that a Slackware system isn't simply going to start doing website filtering all on its own. Either your ISP is doing something funky (in which case when it starts, no computer is going to be able access those sites) or your router is starting to act up (which would also affect all computers on the system) some software you recently installed, or updates you recently applied, went bad and are causing funky behavior.

What you probably need to do is two things to figure out if the problem is isolated to the Slackware machine or is more widely spread. If you have access to another computer on the same network, when the Slackware system conks out, try accessing those site with the second computer. If you can't, then either your router or your ISP are the problem. If you can then you need to dig into the Slackware box.
To be honest, this screams that the problem is outside the Slackware box. Two separate devices having the exact same problem is highly unlikely.

There are a couple of ways to restart the network connection. First, you could try running /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 restart and see if that clears things up (by the way, this assumes you're configuring the card using the normal Slackware scripts to begin with. If you're not, please elaborate on how you do configure the card). If that doesn't get it going, you'll probably need to bring the interface down with ifconfig, remove and reload the driver with modprobe.

As for related services, you want to check that your router is still your gateway. Have a look at the output of route -n and make sure. Also have a look at the contents of /etc/resolv.conf and make sure that they are valid nameservers. You might have to ask your ISP about what IP addresses you should be using for nameservers.

There is also /var/log/syslog and the output of the dmesg command.