Network connection problem reaching certain pages

olividir · November 12, 2023, 10:00am

This has been asked before and I have found quite many answers that have not worked so far for me.

The problem is that some sites do not load at all and some videos on Udemy do not play. Let me explain.

I have been going through some courses on Udemy, most of the courses are for my hobbies. I have noticed that some videos do work, but other do not. I went through long and boring support ticket. That resulted in them saying that they didn’t support Linux web browsers…
Then there are sites like when I am trying to log into my work mail, which is Microsoft Outlook. The log in site does not show up, in stead I get black canvas prompting me that the server could be down, I could be behind VPN (which I do not use) or I could be offline.
This also true for few local sites, such as www.hekla.is

I have tried clearing cache, enabling/disabling drm and hardware acceleration.
I have tried to install “missing” ffmpeg codecs (can’t find the correct command for now, will look better).
Tried installing MPV player, a solution I found on the Arch forum (which got Udemy working until next restart).
I have tried installing Google-Chrome and logging in that way, without using any privacy extension, with same results.

For my curiosity I installed Fedora on GNOME-boxes, logged into my Firefox account, which sets up all my extensions and tried Udemy, hekla.is and Outlook. The results is that on Fedora everything works.

I am at a loss now, there are bunch of threads for “Udemy videos not playing on Linux”, most of these are resolved with clearing cache, toggling drm - hardware acceleration on/off or installing some libavcodec package or not solved at all.

BS86 · November 12, 2023, 11:31am

it all depends on your hardware, but this wiki should help:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration

olividir · November 12, 2023, 12:09pm

Thank you for this link, didn’t know about it.

However, my browser is still not playing these videos and these few sites are not loading after adding drivers for AMD, changing gfx.webrender.all and meda.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to true. This is too hard at the moment.

olividir · November 12, 2023, 4:33pm

I honestly cannot find any settings within FF on EOS and Fedora that are different, but for some reason I am not having this problem on Fedora…

Hardware acceleration wiki did not help, so I have no idea what to check next

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 5:59pm

Do you have an URL to a non-working sample video?

olividir · November 12, 2023, 6:15pm

Yes I do
https://www.udemy.com/course/gimp-photo-editing/learn/lecture/21248810#overview
does not work (one of quite many).

I just found out that Fedora uses mesa driver for webGL 1 redering whle I am using AMD.

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 6:18pm

Oh, I mean public URL.

Also it can’t be that complicated. FF comes with ffmpeg build-in and should play everything out of the box if isn’t DRMed. And we established that it works on other systems and you turned on DRM in the FF settings.

olividir · November 12, 2023, 6:22pm

All the settings are the same, but somehow DMR content is not playing for me on Udemy.

I do not have public video. However, www.hekla.is does not display for me, nor login.live.com

Both only display black content suggesting that I could be:

Offline
Behind VPN (I don’t use VPN)
Server might be down (which is not, because I can load these sites using different computers).

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 6:27pm

So is it problem on this system or FF only? Does it work on the same installation if you use a different browser like Chromium?

In the console if you do a curl -LI "https://www.hekla.is/" what do you see?

olividir · November 12, 2023, 6:31pm

Using different browser does not affect the outcome. This seems to only “affect” this installation

curl -LI "https://www.hekla.is/"
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: www.hekla.is

Just so you see, using Fedora which runs within GNOME boxes gives this results (sorry, only fig, but it will have to do)

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 6:35pm

OK. So it can’t find the hekla.is server on the internet. The gnome-box screenshot is what is should look like.

Are the network settings OK, esp. the DNS server? Is there a difference compared to gnome-box? What’s the output of dig hekla.is?

olividir · November 12, 2023, 6:38pm

I don’t know how to change DNS settings, never have needed to. Will check now, but it should be the same.

[olividir@ProX-AMD5 ~]$ dig hekla.is

; <<>> DiG 9.18.19 <<>> hekla.is
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 30405
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 7, ADDITIONAL: 13

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;hekla.is.			IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
hekla.is.		491	IN	A	52.49.138.181

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
is.			5038	IN	NS	bes.isnic.is.
is.			5038	IN	NS	ht-tldsecondary01.isnic.is.
is.			5038	IN	NS	sab.isnic.is.
is.			5038	IN	NS	tg-tldsecondary01.isnic.is.
is.			5038	IN	NS	sunic.sunet.se.
is.			5038	IN	NS	set.isnic.is.
is.			5038	IN	NS	durinn.rhnet.is.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
bes.isnic.is.		83997	IN	A	204.61.216.116
sab.isnic.is.		83997	IN	A	194.146.106.58
set.isnic.is.		69068	IN	A	194.0.25.41
sunic.sunet.se.		76238	IN	A	192.36.125.2
durinn.rhnet.is.	9685	IN	A	130.208.16.20
ht-tldsecondary01.isnic.is. 67956 IN	A	185.93.156.10
tg-tldsecondary01.isnic.is. 82867 IN	A	185.93.156.154
bes.isnic.is.		59447	IN	AAAA	2001:500:14:6116:ad::1
sab.isnic.is.		54134	IN	AAAA	2001:67c:1010:14::53
set.isnic.is.		10267	IN	AAAA	2001:678:20::41
sunic.sunet.se.		2966	IN	AAAA	2001:6b0:7::2
durinn.rhnet.is.	9685	IN	AAAA	2a00:c88:10:16::20
ht-tldsecondary01.isnic.is. 10727 IN	AAAA	2001:67c:6c:56::10

;; Query time: 3 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.3.1#53(192.168.3.1) (UDP)
;; WHEN: Sun Nov 12 18:37:11 GMT 2023
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 501

Not sure if this is what you are looking for regarding DNS server:

[olividir@ProX-AMD5 ~]$ cat /etc/resolv.conf 
# Generated by NetworkManager
nameserver 192.168.3.1

The one from Boxes is

nameserver 127.0.0.53
options edns0 trust-ad
search .

Why does my nameserver not have options edns0 trust-ad?

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 6:53pm

The dig output looks OK. I’m not a network guy, so this goes somewhat above my paygrade too now. I don’t think that options edns0 trust-ad is important though.

But it seems that there’s something wrong with the network settings. Curl should be able to pull the URL like the gnome-box did, and FF is just another victim of whatever is wrong here.

Maybe curl -LI --verbose hekla.is hints to a cause.

olividir · November 12, 2023, 6:55pm

This is way over my understanding. Have never changed any settings for server.

[olividir@ProX-AMD5 ~]$ curl -LI --verbose hekla.is
*   Trying 52.49.138.181:80...
* Connected to hekla.is (52.49.138.181) port 80
> HEAD / HTTP/1.1
> Host: hekla.is
> User-Agent: curl/8.4.0
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
< Server: nginx
Server: nginx
< Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:54:08 GMT
Date: Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:54:08 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html
Content-Type: text/html
< Content-Length: 138
Content-Length: 138
< Connection: keep-alive
Connection: keep-alive
< Location: https://www.hekla.is/
Location: https://www.hekla.is/

< 
* Connection #0 to host hekla.is left intact
* Clear auth, redirects to port from 80 to 443
* Issue another request to this URL: 'https://www.hekla.is/'
* Could not resolve host: www.hekla.is
* Closing connection
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: www.hekla.is

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 6:57pm

Nothing more there. If you go to the system’s network settings and just add “8.8.8.8” (google) as DNS server, can you reach hekla is then?

olividir · November 12, 2023, 7:02pm

Do you remember where I do that?

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 7:09pm

Good question!

I never ran an Arch server. And whenever I have to do it on the desktop - which rarely happens - I use the KDE Plasma settings app.

olividir · November 12, 2023, 7:11pm

Oh boy been reading about it, but so far Arch wiki has been taking me in the wrong direction

Schlaefer · November 12, 2023, 7:12pm

Maybe scratch all this and start a new thread with “Network connection problem reaching certain pages”. Just to attract more educated users who skip on a “Firefox codecs” thread.

olividir · November 12, 2023, 7:15pm

Done and done.

In my defense, I thought I was missing plugins.