Hi guys, I am new to this forum and am hoping you can help me out of a wee pickle. I have been using Linux mint for a while now and have noticed that I cannot access certain websites on it. I am reasonably new to linux but not to computing in general. The website I am trying to access on firefox is http://vle.wit.ie which is a college e-learning support site. The error I get is: Unable to connect
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at vle.wit.ie.

I have 2 other computers at home and both are able to access the site no problem. Even more stangely, if I set up a ssh proxy to one of the other machines that can access the site it works no problem. (Basically a ssh -D socks proxy)

I have tried clearing firefox's cache, resetting the pc and router, and disabling add-ons but to no avail. I am running linux mint x64. DNS name resolution does not seem to be a problem as I am able to resolve the name using 'host vle.wit.ie'. The only change that I have made to default settings in about:config is to proxy dns requests but this is not the problem as defaulting it didnt resolve the problem.

Thanks

Am using Linux Mint as well and as I am able to access the site you mentioned it appears that it is not a Linux Mint issue ;-)

You said that it does not appear to be a resolution issue, it means you tried to ping that site or nslookup that site I guess. Did you try accessing the site via IP from Firefox?

Try this http://193.1.193.187 which appears to be the address of the site you are trying to access.

Also if Firefox work with the above mentioned IP address then it has something to do with the name resolution. If it is unable to connect even using IP address then there is some problem with firefox connecting to this site. Usually Unable to connect message comes up when the browser unable to find the site and finally times out.

I also found that the site you are trying to access is https. It might be possible that Firefox taking time to convert http session to https. So try accessing the site directly using https: https://vle.wit.ie.

check the http headers to debug the problem.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/fir...-http-headers/

THanks for the great advice guys and thankfully I found the problem!
I had forgotten that I had installed ipblock some time ago and that was the problem. I completely forgot about it because it starts up silently with no icon.

The http headers addon is definitely a keeper though!

Thanks

Glad to hear that it has been resolved.

Please mark this thread as solved.