Bug 676980

Summary: Internet apps not working properly, possibly related to kernel update, not sure.
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Dan Sebald <dan>
Component: kernelAssignee: Kernel Maintainer List <kernel-maint>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 14CC: gansalmon, itamar, jonathan, kernel-maint, madhu.chinakonda
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Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2011-02-17 19:04:56 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Dan Sebald 2011-02-12 08:00:15 UTC 
Description of problem:  Firefox and Konquerer aren't working properly.  They can't consistently find web pages.  (Thunderbird got stuck once on launch too, but that may have been related to Firefox.  Again, too obscure to tell.)

It's an intermittent loss of data or connection refused.  A page won't load, then a second later I try again and the page will load.  Or a page will load and a portion of it (an advert) will say "page cannot be found", along with the orange caution triangle.  Sometimes a page will load but the images aren't loaded.  I've seen where the page is loaded and the text is all displayed but in a vertical list rather than being formatted properly in a spatial sense.  Konquerer has similar problems.

There were several updates this afternoon (February 11, 2011) two of which stood out in my mind, an upgrade to Shockwave Flash, and an upgrade to the kernel for a security fix.  I thought it might be Shockwave, but for hours I tried going back to previous versions of Shockwave and no luck.  I'd disable shockwave and no go.  Reinstall Firefox and still the same.  So, I'm leaning toward the kernel update being the source of the problem.  Perhaps the security fix is randomly blocking data from pages believing it is insecure.

I had IPv6 disabled on my machine (because DNS server doesn't work with IPv6) with the following suggestion:

http://fedoraunity.org/solved/network-solutions/disable-ipv6
      su -c 'echo "install ipv6 /bin/true
      blacklist ipv6" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-ipv6.conf'
      su -c 'service ip6tables stop && chkconfig ip6tables off'

and things were working just fine.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):  Fedora 14


How reproducible:


Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Install updates as of mid day 11-feb-2011 (wish there were a history file of updates I accepted so I could be more accurate)
2.  Run Firefox.
3.  Try www.weather.com, or the Yahoo question pages.  Those two always seem to have something that fails.
  
Actual results:  Lots of orange caution triangles.


Expected results:  No caution triangles and pages formatted properly.


Additional info:
Comment 1 Dan Sebald 2011-02-13 18:05:11 UTC 
I wanted to drop the severity of this bug because for some strange reason in the past two days my web browsers seem to be working as expected again, except for the fact that the Shockwave plugin does not work in Firefox.  (There is no selection box to do so.)

Perhaps it was my DSL line with problems (haven't had any in two years).  More likely it was Firefox related.  Firefox just doesn't behave well with memory.  In Fedora 14, two applications running plus Firefox will put the kernel in out-of-memory-app-kill mode (512 MB, I know small machine, but hey).  Epiphany will go into that mode being the sole process and opening www.weather.com.  Konqueror seems the nicest in terms of memory use, but it is slow.

In a week or two I will close this bug report if no persistent problems exist.
Comment 2 Dan Sebald 2011-02-17 19:04:56 UTC 
I'm closing this bug report and attributing the problem to the VLC plugin.  These large apps (VLC/Firefox) don't work together well with 512 MB memory, plus VLC appears to create vestigial Shockwave plugins.  (I looked and looked for where those were until I uninstall VLC-plugin and the Shockwave plugins went away.)  Bit of a mess.

Sorry folks.