I’m not new to linux, and I’ve been happily using SuSE since 9.3, but this is my first post here, so please have mercy on the forum noob. :embarrassed:
I’m trying to figure out why when I go to a particular banking website to log on, the site takes about 3-5 minutes at times to load. This started happening about a month ago.
Here’s the process:
I go to the front site, which is http, and choose to do online banking
This sends me to the https logon page, which takes 3-5 minutes to load
If I do get to logon, it takes another minute to pass to the actual banking page
After that, everything is zippy-quick
I’ve gone to it using XP, OS X 10.5.5, Scientific Linux 5.2, and openSUSE 11.0, all using Firefox 3.0.3 with the result being that only the linux OSes take the extended time to load.
I suspect that it’s a server-side issue with my bank, but I wanted to see if anyone else had this problem and some ideas on how to deal with it.
It’s a well-known problem that many banking sites concentrate on IE specifically, because tight security is much harder to maintain when you have several different browsers to cater to. As their customer, you can’t do much except politely notify them – or migrate to another bank. On the other hand, if they’re really all that concerned with the security of your money, it’s somewhat wacky they should go with the arguably most insecure browser on the planet. No, really! Of all browsers.
Thanks for the quick reply! I guess the fact that it doesn’t appear to be the browser that I find odd about the whole thing. I thought it was the old IE problem coming back again as well. But I’m using Firefox, the bank supports Firefox, and it was running on Firefox on Linux fast as can be up until a month ago with no problems. Then pop! It slows to a trickle of traffic only in linux!? Very odd.
I’ve even tried VirtualBox with a Windows XP Pro guest os and NAT, but no joy. I’ve recently looked at system updates to the Kernel, the browser, network settings, firewall. No joy!
It’s the sudden change from working fine to not working that’s got me curious. It doesn’t make sense that it’s only affecting one OS unless it is either intentional or a glaring mistake.
I’m going to try to contact support at the bank to see what else could be causing it. It’s all very odd.
gnort wrote:
> It doesn’t make sense that it’s only affecting one OS unless
> it is either intentional or a glaring mistake.
Are you kidding? Of course it is intentional. Do you think M$ server software
gets creepy slow when serving to Linux clients by accident?
They have been doing that for ages. First time I saw it for myself was back in
the '90s when they first started to try to make NT into a web page server.
Are you aware of just how much information about you, your OS, browser,
location, etc, etc, etc is revealed to server software? Click to go here: http://aruljohn.com/details.php