I have upgraded (finally) from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10, using preupgrade, and everything went fine. I then did the same thing going from 10 to 11, and now neither Firefox nor Thunderbird can make the appropriate connections. I can ping the servers, no problem; also, both the "Update System" and "Install Software" utilities work, so I know I have both a good connection and a valid DNS specification. So, why can't I get my email or log on to a website?

I didn't notice this before, because I was focused on not being able to reach the Web, but I'm also getting garbled sound in games and stored movies, as if the sound driver is trying to play everything at double speed by leaving out every other tenth of a second's worth of sound. I don't like the idea of restoring from backup, because it's such a royal pain, but I'm thinking that's my only option at this point.

Speaking of which, does anyone have some good suggestions on how to make it easy to restore from a full dar backup? My current method is:

1) Do a clean system install from scratch
2) install dar from the Web
3) restore /home from the backup
4) reinstall games, utilities, etc. from the Web by hand as I realize I've forgotten them

my problem is that I haven't yet figured out how to run dar without being booted from the drive I'm trying to restore. The ideal would be to create a bootable CD, DVD, or thumb drive that would have dar on it and give me access to both my backup DVDs and the hard drive I'm trying to restore, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

you do know that fedora 11 uses A DIFFERENT partition format that WAS NOT installed when you did the "preupgrade"
fedora 9 used "ext3" and fedora 11 and 12 now use ext4 format .


the fedora deves RECOMMEND doing a full clean install and in the case of fedora 11 or 12 a reformat during the install

Um. Well. Actually, no, I didn't know that. But would that have caused my Internet and sound problems? I would have expected that I wouldn't be able to boot at all, or at least that I would have had file access problems of some sort.

Ah, well, it's moot. It sounds more and more like I was right about needing to restore from backup. What fun, what joy, what rapture.

with fedora you do need to do a FULL reinstall every 6 months , when the new version comes out .
Some people have not had issues using update ( or at least not many ) I am NOT one of them . In the past 5 years i have NEVER had a upgrade work correctly . or things change SO much that a clean install was the ONLY option.

i keep my data on a large partition ( 160 gig)
and the fedora / on a 15 gig partition
my /home on a 5 gig partition
and swap on a 2 gig partition

this way it is very ease to just reinstall fedora -- without loosing my data

OK, that makes sense; I think I'll try it. Thanks for the suggestion.

Getting back to this installation, though:

I've done a clean install from a 2-month old installation DVD. I completed with no apparent issues.

I booted up and tried to do an update. No connection. I noticed the red "X" on the network icon, brought up the connections list, enabled eth0, and tried again. The update completed OK, with no apparent issues.

I rebooted again and retried a system update. No connection. I re-enabled eth0, this time editing it to enable automatically at bootup. This time the update utility reported that no update was necessary, so I brought up Firefox. Got the Fedora home page. Tried to go to Google -- "not found."

Exited Firefox, brought up a terminal, and pinged www.google.com; typical response time was about 49 msec, with no errors.

So, why can't I get to the Google web page? Until I can get this resolved, I don't see any point in going through the partitioning effort, much less restoring my /home directory tree, seeing if email works again, debugging my sound system, and all the rest of it.

hi andymck in response to the pm

"1. Are you set up with dual boot?"
triple boot Arch , CentOS 5.4 and XP ( on it's own drive)
-----------------
"2. To be using that many partitions, I assume you are using LVM. Has that been an issue, either for stability or for clean installs?"

nope i use ext4 ( i have never liked LVM on anything other than on a server )
for a home machine LVM is way more trouble than it is worth

also NOT using LVM makes reinstall very easy
Fedora is a bit of an odd ball with reinstalling for every new release .
CentOS has much less of an issue with this
a new version can be put on " /" and most of the time the /home partition can be left intact ( except fedora)
---------------
"3. How do you do a clean install without wiping out your data partitions? If you tell me, "By excluding them from the installation," how do you re-access them after the install is complete?"

"How do you do a clean install without wiping out your data partitions?"
by just installing centOS on ( say sdb4 ) as "/" and the cent "/home" on sdb5
and /boot on sdb3
grub will not need reinstalling , but it is easier just to let the installer do it any way
the main os goes in / and you ( may or may not need) to put "home" on its partition
i do except for when reinstalling a OS that I FUBARED and i am reinstalling THE SAME version

"how do you re-access them after the install is complete?"
the way you do know by adding the partitions to your "/etc/fstab" file
the root user dose not need a /home/? folder to run only "normal" users need that

---------------------
4. How do you take care of re-installing programs that are not part of the normal installation? What I mean is, have you automated re-installing them somehow or do you re-install them manually?

i install them on the DATA partition ( yes it is a named partition and most OS's will auto detect it during the install ) . For example i build from source these programs
gimp ,cinepaint imagemagick,nip2/vips, and a bunch of others
i build then install them on the my DATA drive ( a very big partition that i share with Arch and CentOS )

"have you automated re-installing them somehow or do you re-install them manually?"

i just have been building programs from source for SO long that it is not an issue
but a bash script could be used to get updated versions of the programs ( if needed)and do the build
---------
I'm sorry to be asking questions that probably seem elementary to you, and I'm sure the answers are somewhere in the Fedora documentation, but I've been looking for them and can't find them.

no problem that is why we are here

OK, this is making me crazy. Here is my situation, in as much detail as I can think would be relevant:

1. I'm running a Dell Dimension 4600, some 5 or 6 years old, with a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and 1G of memory; nothing special, in other words. My network connection is IPv4 DSL, through SBC.

2. I have a 3-way GRUB boot setup. Win XP is in a single partition, Fedora 10 and Fedora 12 each have a set of ext4 partitions, no LVM, except that the Fedora 10 /boot partition is ext3 because that's what Anaconda insisted on setting up. All three are clean "from scratch" installations, not upgrades.

3. WinXP runs as well as I'd expect. Fedora 10, my default boot, seems to have no problems. Fedora 12 boots OK, with no apparent problems, but I can't reach most of the Internet through Firefox. I can go to the Fedora home page and navigate around it, but nothing else.

4. What is really weird to me is that I can ping a web server (Google, for example, as either google.com or www.google.com), but not get there from Firefox. I've tried both searching with the Fedora search utility and entering the URL directly in the navigation toolbar; either way, it comes up, "Page not found."

5. Thunderbird also can't find my mail servers.

6. I have done a couple of software updates "successfully"; the updates completed with no apparent problems, but the 'net access problem persists.

7. FWIW, I did try installing Fedora 11; it acts just like Fedora 12 does. Also FWIW, I also created USB thumb drive installations with liveusb-creator, from both F11 and F12, with the same results -- ping found whatever I wanted, Firefox found the Fedora homepage but nothing else.

I know there's something I'm missing, but what is it? What is different about a DNS lookup that it would succeed from ping, but not from Firefox or Thunderbird? I can see that Firefox MIGHT have the Fedora IP address hardcoded "under the covers" where I can't see it, and thus bypass the need for a DNS call, but that still wouldn't explain why ping succeeds in finding google.com and Firefox doesn't.

Anyone?

There is a big problem in Fedora and I don't think anyone knows how to fix it.

If your having problems with connecting to rpmfusion.org , follow the instructions below.
If this isn't the problem you can always backtrack and remove everything.

I have installed quite a number of Fedora 10, 11, 12 boxes and this problem has occured in about 75% of the installs.

There is a fix at end of these instructions for Firefox if it is having problems of connecting to some sites like rpmfusion.org , linuxtoday.com lxer.com , just a few.

To eliminate typos mistakes, do a Copy and Paste of Lines that need to be put in Fedora.

LOL.


1. Q: Networking (or DNS) seems really slow and fails often (Updated 2 January 2009)
A: If Fedora 10's networking seems slow or you get frequent network connection failures (when other Fedoras or other OSes were working just fine on your machine), then you're probably hitting this bug.

Here's how you can work around it:

1. Open a Terminal.
2. Become root:

su -
3. Make sure that the "dnsmasq" program is installed (it usually is, by default, in Fedora 10):

rpm -q dnsmasq

If that says "package dnsmasq is not installed", then you need to install dnsmasq, by running the following command:

yum install dnsmasq
4. Now, you have to find out which network interface your machine is using:

route -n

You'll see some output that looks like this:

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

The eth0 there (the furthest bottom-right text in the output) is the name of the network interface I'm using. Yours might be eth1 or something totally different. Just remember it for the next step.
5. Now create a file called /etc/dhclient-<your network interface>.conf. For example, if your network interface is eth0, the file would be called /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf.

You can create the file with this command (assuming your network interface is eth0):

nano /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf

Then make this the only line in the file:

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

And then save the file and close it (Ctrl-X then Y).

If you have both a wireless and a wired network connection, you will have to do this step once for each of them.
6. Now start dnsmasq:

service dnsmasq start

And make sure that it will start every time your computer starts:

chkconfig dnsmasq on
7. Now restart your network connection:

service NetworkManager restart

And now things should be as fast as normal again. You might have to restart the programs that you're running for them to pick up the changes that NetworkManager made when it restarted.



2. * IPv6 in Firefox
You might notice that your browsing through Firefox is a little slow on Fedora 10. This is because Firefox 3 has enabled by default IPv6 which causes Firefox to first resolve an IPv6 address and after the connection fails it switches to IPv4. To change this setting type:

about:config


and in Filter box type:

network.dns.disableIPv6


Right click on it, select Toggle and change its value to true. Restart Firefox and you are ready!




Selinux Relabeling files.

setenforce 0; fixfiles -F restore; setenforce 1; reboot

It's not that I can't reach "some" files -- it's that I can't reach ANY that aren't on the Fedora website, and not even all of those. Also, it's not only in Firefox; Thunderbird can't find my email server either. I don't think this is what I'm experiencing; if 75% of all installations are having the same trouble I am, I can't believe that it would have been released.

This sounds like a pretty esoteric fix. What does it do and why is it necessary?

you might be having the same problem i have .
on some older computers the ipv6 calls crash the network card .

In my case the only option i had was to disable ipv6 during install of fedora . there WAS NO OTHER WAY to get the net to work.

the ipv6 calls were crashing my very old network card and then crashing my cable modem .

Maybe I'm out of line here, but I think you will have to back the entire way. After much hesitation, I went to fedoraproject.org and saved all the guides. Do your self the favour, very well done. On their recommendation I re-installed FC12 instead of upgrading. This made sense to me from experience with older computers. 12 runs as well as Firefox and Thunderbird. I first had FC3, then 10 and 11. OK, so this leaves the upgrade you did.

Oh yes, and I was pleasantly surprised that 12 auto-installs GRUB after re-initializing the disc. Fancy! Not quite.

Under Linpus Linux (Fedora derivative) my Aspire One allowed my SD card to be read as contiguous memory to show 10GB instead of the 8GB HDD. Under FC10 I did a bash script gotten from macles' site to set the SD transparent. All the re-installs after that, about 5 or 6 maybe even 8, including re-initials (various reasons, never a problem with FF, TB) did not change this setup. I cannot discern the SD from the rest of the rig. And I get an error if I click on a specific vfat volume - I cannot identify it. And I've ignored it since until now the switches haven't yet tripped to wipe the disc clean. But I know I'll be doing it.

Point. The file systems on these drives come back intact as they were before refits. This proves that you can leave your data on a different partition, even a different drive so that re-installs only touch the OS. I gather that this, quietly, is understood in the Linux community. It also serves as a lazy man's back up.

It's a case of GIGO, garbage in garbage out. In this case not so much the fault of Fedora but the disc managing software or better the interface between that and Fedora. The upgrade left your disc in a garbled state and entirely out of logic. One diagnostic will not even lead to traces of leads to other diagnostics. This kind of thing was seen looong before Windows was a twinkle in Billy's eye.

Brothers in muck, what! Here's to reformatting drives!
Good luck!

Oh yes, now I remember. The old Amiga A500 (7 MHz clock, 0.5 - 3.0 MB RAM Max) was extended by a sidecar A590 driving a 52 MB HDD. You could reformat this on a low and a high level. The high level was reasonably non-destructive, but the low level really went into the bits. Left nothing. From what I've seen, nothing has really changed here. It can't be different. Fedora does a high level reformat only. Nothing wrong with being careful.