Hi

Am using Chromium on Mint and cannot get some websites to load eg Hotmail (in any of its forms eg www.hotmail.com, www.live.com or www.outlook.com and the mint forum.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated by this newbie.

Thank you.

Are you under any proxy server?
Does your internet connection show continuous flow of data?
Have you tried without using www?
Can you open https sites like gmail & facebook?
What is the output of following commands?

My guess would be DNS. Can you ping the sites by name?

$ ping -c 2 hotmail.com

You can lookup the dns on sites like network-tools.com and add entries in /etc/hosts to do the dns lookup locally. Not a long term solution, but it can help rule out the culprits.

On dialup long ago, I had to fiddle with the MTU size for some sites. Some required a full 1500 (default) others only worked with 576 (dialup size). Crazy times and only seemed to affect poorly configured servers.

This is the output from ping hotmail.com
PING hotmail.com (65.55.77.28) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- hotmail.com ping statistics ---
31 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 30239ms

Sites like Facebook and Google are no problem.
I am using a 3g data plan from a local provider.

I'd suspect IPv6.

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is IPv6?

IPv6 is a relatively new way of doling out ip addresses because it is possible that IPv4 (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) addresses will run out.
http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials...urse-for-linux

I have not had any direct experience with it, but I have read here of issues such as yours being resolved by turning of IPv6 in the network configuration; again, though, I have no personal experience, so take that with a grain or two of salt. Here's an article from the Ubuntu wiki (your user agent icon says you are using Ubuntu) that might help:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IPv6

Opps, I need to read.

If you don't get reply from nslookup or dig for www.hotmail.com then you need to diag your dns servers or hosts file or proxy.pac or proxy server.

Always use www.somesite.com instead of somesite.com.

Ping is a poor test. Use nslookup and or dig instead to find IP resolution.

Chrome has had a problem for awhile. Sites you try to load from a link from another site don't load normally. You can get them to load by clicking on the maximize/restore button. Maximize it if it's not already mazimmized, or unmax it if it is. You can then put it back to where it was. It's a pain, and seems to have been fixed in the latest dev channel builds. Not sure about beta or stable.

www.site.TLD and site.TLD should be swappable. Granted that some sites misconfigure things so only one or the other works. But many browsers will prefix www. on the name and try again if it doesn't work the other way. And postfix .com in a few cases as well.

Your ping resolved the IP address so DNS is working, but you had 100% packet loss. A site doesn't have to respond to icmp packets. Although most of the big company ones do. And I can ping that one with the same IP you resolved. You got an IP for the site, so the DNS part is working. There could be some routing issue, or some firewall rules that are preventing things from working as expected. Perhaps traceroute or other things might help identify the issue.

Thanks for all the replies, people.

The problem is now intermittent and easily solved by rebooting my 3G gizmo until Hotmail finally shows its face. Knowing very little about IP, DNS etc but enough to know about having to have a unique addresses, I suspect that all your suggestions about IP address allocations and things way over my head, are correct.

I'll live with having to reboot the 3G gizmo.

Sometimes I just get typing and not reading. Shadow_7 has been reading this better than I have.

Usually it is an IPv6 issue.

This is a newbie dangerous way to see if chrome is using ipv6. chrome://net-internals/#dns

Disable it and see if it fixes the hotmail deal.