Internet: browsers fails to connect to SOME sites, not all, for no reason.

[Matthew Flaschen]

Vincent Trouilliez wrote:

> The problem is that now, 75% of the time, when I enter a URL in the web
> browser, it says it can't find the site.

Can you clarify?  Is it definitely a DNS issue (e.g. Address Not Found.
 Firefox can't find the server at ... in Firefox).  Is it 75% of URLs
consistently not found, or random URLs popping in and out?

 However, in a terminal, if I
> ping said sites, it has no problems resolving thei names, and it can
> connect/ping them just fine. Also, if I try to connect to these sites
> from a Windows virtual machine, they work perfectly.  So I guess it's 
> not a problem with these sites, nor with my ISP's DNS
> machine.

Intriguing.  You could try:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall netbase

Also, how exactly is your connectivity set up?

> So I guess it's not a problem with these sites, nor with my ISP's DNS
> machine. I also tried using a "fresh"/new user account... no joy.

There shouldn't be user-specific settings, unless of course you're using
NetworkManager, in which case you should disable it if at all possible.

Matt Flaschen