# Firefox can't connect, but links and portage can

## mbreith

I am having a very odd problem. The wireless on my computer is working fine. I can connect to the internet at school and load web pages with no problems.

However, I can't connect to the internet at home using either Firefox or Chrome. I can connect using Links and portage has no problems accessing external websites. I am also able to connect to the internet using Windows, but it just got virused rather badly. (Stupid Windows)

I also checked and I am able to connect to the wireless router using Firefox, I just can't get any external web pages to load. 

I'm at a loss on even what to start with on this. Any suggestions at all?

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## na641

perhaps its a proxy setting issue? did you check your firefox connection settings? under advanced tab

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## mbreith

I have tried 'no proxy', 'auto detect proxy', and 'use system proxy settings'. I haven't tried manually configuring the proxy because I don't know what port to put in. I am also only guessing that I would put in the IP address of the router.

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## Ahenobarbi

Did you try with clean config ( or as other user )?

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## mbreith

I just tried connecting while using a spare user account that I have on my computer. Still has the same problem. 

While running Firefox from the command line it gave me some gconf error. Something about enabling TCP/IP in ORBit. I don't think that is what is causing the problems though since I can connect in other wifi spots.

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## mbreith

OK. I found out that the problem is with the DNS. For some reason the router here is not using itself as a nameserver. It is using an external nameserver from the ISP as primary. 

So for now I am hacking it together by manually adding the external nameserver to /etc/resolv.conf and everything works fine.

Now does anyone know why ping and links were able to resolve URL names when Firefox, Chromium, and Midori couldn't?

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## Rexilion

 *mbreith wrote:*   

> Now does anyone know why ping and links were able to resolve URL names when Firefox, Chromium, and Midori couldn't?

 

Perhaps they use a fallback cache of some sort. Were you only able to visit sites that you were able to visit before?

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## Nacon

I encountered the same symptoms a few month ago, as I had to replace my current router for a few days.

(As a workaround, the manually added nameserver worked for me, too)

Fortunately, after re-switching the routers, the DNS resolving worked for me again.

That's why I haven't reviewed the problem in-depth.

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