Can't view wiki pages on any browser except links
 

hi all,

this might sound like a weird problem, but whenever I try and view web pages in firefox/konqueror/even dillo :) that contain/are some sort of wiki, they won't load - they just hang for ages and ages. they do, however, load in links - strange, huh? i'm on a dial up connection using a driver i bought from linuxant, but i don't see how this could be the problem. is there something wrong with my networking setup?

i'm running a newly installed slackware 11.

thanks in advance.

Can you give some more information?

Can you click the stop and back buttons and have them behave as expected?
Can you type a new address in the address box and go to the new location?
Is the progress bar at the bottom right corner in firefox showing any progress?
Have you tried to view page source?
Have you tried to view page info?
Can you select a bookmark and go to the new location?
Have you tried starting firefox or any of the other browsers that are not behaving as expected from the commandline to spot any error messages they may be outputting?

thanks for your reply,

the stop and back buttons work fine, as does typing a new address in the address bar and going to it. the progress bar makes a little progress but then stops at about a quarter - but a look at the gkrellm ppp monitor shows some very slow (around 300b/s) activity while it is stalled. however, viewing the page source works, and viwing the page info works too, but there aren't many 'links' or 'media'.

starting firefox from the command line doesn't seem to get me any extra error messages or logging - is there a special option i need to use?

thanks again.

EDIT: it now seems that, after waiting for a minute or two, the page will load, and any subsequent pages on the same wiki work fine - but this is still odd, i've never had a similar problem before.

My first guess from what you described would be an issue with caching a lot of the graphical elements on the page since links works fine. You might also want to check the proxy setup on your graphical browsers and compare it to the proxy setup on links. Since not everyone knows how to set proxies on links it could be that only your graphical browsers have proxy setup.

i've looked at my proxy setting on firefox and tried toggling a few things, like enabling pipelining and changing the maximum connections, etc. but this doesn't make any difference - i'm beginning to think it's something to do with the way pppd is being run (currently i'm using kppp, but i have tried wvdial and it doesn't make any difference) or something in the kernel/modem drivers, since all pages load fine in windows with exactly the same modem and using firefox.

this issue is now resolved. it turns out it was an issue with my MTU setting. using /sbin/ifconfig i found that it was set to 1500. i tried setting it to the de-facto dial-up setting of 576, and it worked perfectly - wiki pages, resuming downloads etc work again! what's more, i now currently have it set to 1499, and it still works perfectly, but with less overhead than at 576.

i advise anyone experiencing similar problems to try adjusting their MTU - hey, it worked for me!

thanks all the same to claytonjohnroby for his advice.