Date: Fri, 1 Sep 95 11:38:28 EDT From: jeffa@sybase.com (Jeff Anuszczyk) To: bobb@netcom.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Getting Netscape running... Message-ID: <9509011538.AA07071@teak.sybgate.sybase.com>
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Recently I had trouble getting Netscape to run. The symptoms were that Netscape would startup, however as soon as I selected the Options menu, it would pop down and then the entire X Window session would hang (can't change focus, iconify anything, etc). Well, after a bit of work I finally tracked down what the problem was. I'm hoping that someone can shed some light on why things are happening this way. First, the fundamental problem was my network was not setup totally correct. Even though the host.conf file lists "hosts" and then "bind" apparently Netscape ignores that and only queries the DNS server. My problem was I defined my machine name "zorak" to be 127.0.0.1 even though the DNS stuff has a real IP address. The theory (okay so I'm probably thin in the head) is I want anything addressed to my machine to just go to the localhost. True, a route setup correctly would handle this for me. However my only connection to the internet is via a ppp session that is not always active. I often use the system without connecting to the net so I haven't gotten around to setting everything up totally correctly (actually I have questions about this and iijppp that I'll need to follow up on). In any case, Netscape would query my DNS stuff and get the proper IP address and then try to connect to it. Bingo instant hang. Why this happens is a bit of a mystery. Don't you normally get "No Route to host" type of messages? Of course, now that we have the tunnel devices real connections can get a bit gray. In any case, I've found that if I have any active links/sockets open over a tunnel/ppp device and the telephone line hangs up for some reason the application hangs completely. It doesn't learn about the closing of the link. Hmmm. It's especially bad if I launch an X windows app from a remote system directed to my PC at home. If the link goes down there is nothing I can do (at least I haven't figured it out) to kill the window. The only thing I've found so far is to go back to CTRL/ALT/F1 and issue a KILL -KILL on the process. However alot of times the window manager gets screwed up and then I have to do a CTRL/ALT/BS to kill X. Yuk. Any thoughts or ideas from anyone. This is a change from V1.1.5.1 which would allow graceful dropping of the apps. The system I have is a P100 running FreeBSD V2.0.5-R with XFree86 V3.1. Thanks for your time, - Jeff
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