Hello,

I encountered a problem that looks like this:

http://halik.ironsoftware.net/layout.png

The layout is broken, seems to be plain html, images appear to be broken (even on LQ forums - some of the gifs return broken with 'Website not available').

The problem seems to be on a lot of sites for me, including youtube.com, wordpress.com and lots of other sites. On LQ only the gifs seem to be broken.
Also, it may be related - irssi cant connect to irc.freenode.net (instant 'cant resolve') but I can ping irc.freenode.net and connect to the resolved node (ie gibson.freenode.net).

Ok some technical detail:
I can ping those sites with decent pings and pretty much no lost packets. Forcing (super-refresh) refreshing the sites or simply lots of refreshes don't work - the issue seems to be permanent, not just some lost packets with CSS in them.
I dont use any proxy, tried firefox 4, chrome 12, opera 10.5, disabled all browser plugins, cleared cookies and caches (the ones under about:cache in firefox).
The same problem appears on Ubuntu 11.4 and Fedora 15 on the same Dell D420 laptop (core duo 1.2 ghz, 2 gb ram, 60 gigs drive and some broadcom/intel wifi card), on two different ISPs located about 70 miles apart. So far I exhausted my ideas.

Ill gladly supply any other details that could be helpful in solving this problem.

IronHalik

EDIT:

The layout on those forums seems to be broken too. And the 'edit' button also. :>
Also, on other PC, desktop one connected via ethernet, same ISP/router, ubuntu 10.4, there's no problem with those sites.

It's hard to tell much from the screenshot.

When something like this happens, it's essential to test the site in other browsers to make sure it's not a browser-related issue (or, what is more common, that the site is not written to favor one or two browsers more than others--this used to be a really big problem back during the Browser Wars--sites were written so that they malfunctioned in anything other than IE).

There are some experimental developer tools for Chrome. You might look at getting them and using them to look at the site(s).

If you have Firefox, see about getting the Firebug add-on and taking a look at the site with that.

If you have Opera, open Opera Dragonfly (it's included).

You could also do a "View Source" and see if that reveals anything.

This is a case where a picture is not worth 10,000 words.

Beside the screenshot I also included quite a lot of other information. Now I can tell that the issue resolved itself after a day or so. Then I, for other reasons, re-installed my system and the issue came back. Also, on other notebook, also with fedora had the same issue.
Since something changed and made the problem go away and then come back on a fresh install (two counting the other PC) then I tried to update everything I could. No effect so far.

The link you gave to chrome dev tools is affected by the bug as well, the domain gets instantly unresolved.
From what I tried to find out - wireshark returned only that packets go to my router and return with seemingly no issues.

Tried using opera dragonfly, bt as far as I can tell, and mind thats its not far ;> I see everything all right - the document on slashdot or wordpress seems to be properly defined etc.


Also, it might be a related problem - my wifi connections seems to drop at heavy load. After it drops, it tries to reconnect if preset, previously working password only to constantly ask for the correct password (which is the correct one right now). After I restart the wifi via gnome GUI, it claims the wifi to not be available. When I restart it with ifdown wlan0 ifup wlan0, it seems to start properly but still wont work. Ill review the system log when the error occurs again.
For me, it would seem like some driver/firmware error maybe?

Any ideas?

And sorry for the wall of text ;>

So this has occurred in multiple browsers on old installs and new, if I understand correctly, but it seems unique (in the sense that if YouTube, for example, were seriously broken, we'd be hearing about it from multiple sources).

I must say I have no idea which direction to point you in. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than I will discover this thread.

Since you are testing via wireless, it might be an idea to jack in with an ethernet cable and see if the problem occurs with a wired connection.

Every possible cause that's ruled out is one step closer to the answer.

Well, I tried the cable (duh, how obvious) and it doesn't work.
The issue with dropping connection turns out to be an issue with the b43 open broadcom drivers with fedora.
And since the layout bug was there in ubuntu too, and on other wifi chips on other notebooks then its prolly not related.
Thats the funny part, the bug was 'replicated' on different distros, different systems, different routers, different ISPs, different browser and different users :> There must be something in common. When Ill have the time, ill try to upgrade the kernel to 3.0 on f15 :P

Nevertheless, thank you for the effort frankbell.

As far as I know, it's a connection problem (yes, that is broad). I have encountered this numerous times.

What happens is that the 'html' is loaded but the 'css' file(s) are not (connection lost or timed out). Browsers silently ignore the missing css and you see the 'plain' html.

In my case it's an unreliable / slow connection with the ISP at times. As I use a 'wireless' provider, weather conditions have a huge influence and december till februari (rainy season) are the bad months and I see it a lot.

You can use traceroute to do further analysis where it fails; I'm not a network man so leave the analysis to others (if you post the results)

OK, so it is pretty much solved. The common denominator between all thos systems, install etc was that at both spots, at all time the connection was handled by a TP-Link wireless router. The exact model is a TL-WR740N. I flashed the router with a dd-wrt firmware and it all works well since then. I dont know which setting in the router did this, or if it was a bug in the TP-Link firmware but it the problem is, with a workaround, solved.

Also, it could be worth noting that on windows 7, there was no problem - just on ubuntu/fedora. So ubuntu/fedora is still a partial suspect. I quietly suspect the MTU settings, since linux tried to use 1024 MTU size, and windows usually sets it the same as router. Also, couple years ago I had a similiar problem on a ADSL line and the solution was to manually set the MTU size to the one suggested by ISP. No I tried to play with it but ended up with dd-wrt :>

Anyway, thanks for the help.

Thanks for the feedback, specifically the MTU settings. I will check mine, but I have the problem in Windows as well

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