Upgrade => Internet problems
 

OK, this is weird:

I am running Mandrake 10.0, and am still very new at it. Apparently when I first put it on my machine, I did not install TeX. After serious falilures trying to download and install it, I followed a friend's suggestion and booted with the install CDs, and proceeded to upgrade, and then chose to install most of the TeX packages, as well as all of the items I was forced to upgrade. TeX works like a charm now.

Somehow, however, in the course of the upgrade, my internet connection got funny. When I use Firefox, sometimes web pages work fine, and other times I get:


Net Reset Error

The document contains no data

The link to the site was dropped unexpectedly while negotiating a connection or transferring data. This may be due to a network fault somewhere between the site and your computer. If the problem persists, consult your system documentation, administrator or Internet Service Provider (ISP) as appropriate for further assistance.

Try again


When I click Try Again, things seem to work fine. Sometimes, I may have to try again twice. I got this errror after just plain

Alert! Document contains no data

and I followed some suggestions concerning my about:config.
Also, sometimes, even if the page loads, the images do not (on the first try).

This is not just a Firefox issue: Thunderbird has stopped getting my messages when I start it up (it probably is trying) - this is solved just by cliking "Get Mail". I also get the following error at times when I try to send an e-mail:


Sending of message failed.

The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server smtp.comcast.net failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server setting is correct and try again, or else contact your network administrator.


This is settled (usually) by trying to send the e-mail once more.

So this is not a crippling issue, but certainly annoying. If anyone can suggest anything, I'm all ears.

Thanks,
Flynn

Oh! I guess I should say that I'm connected to the internet via an ethernet card to a cable modem. In MCC it says that my network connection is a LAN. I tried to switch it to cable from the boot disks, and it switched back to LAN by itself. After googling around, I found somebody that says it's supposed to be set at LAN - I don't know where it was set before the "upgrade"

I was having the exact same problem with Firefox running on Fedora Core Linux and I managed to find a solution - after 2 hours of configuring the router, clearing firefox cache, configuring other stuff (all to no avail), I found that simply switching from DHCP to manually setting the IP address, subnet mask and default gateway, and everything then worked fine.

Applications -> System Settings -> Network -> Edit -> Statically set IP addresses

Steve