No web accees after install Evolution (OS 11)

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#1

After I set up Evolution I can no longer access any web-site with Firefox 3 and can no longer receive any mail.

I’m using OpenSuSE 11 with Gnome on a Pentium 4 Dell computer.

I’ve been running OpenSuSE 11 with Firefox 3 since Sunday without any problems of web-site access. Having been satisfied with the stability and performance I decided to start using Evolution Email as part of my migration to Linux. I set up my first Email account and received a message from the Alsa-Project. I was also able to return a confirmation to them.

Things looked good so I decided to go beyond my (very local) boundaries of expertise: I tried to setup Evolution to get News as well. There didn’t seem to be the same sort of support for News as I experience in Thunderbird under Windows.

At that time I realised that Firefox could not access this forum web-site - not any other, like my home page. I get an ‘Address Not Found’ message with a yellow warning triangle in the address bar and further text telling me that the site I am trying to access does not exist.

I can no longer receive Email.

I am also getting other errors (which may be parasitic, I understand), for example:

Package Kit Error: An Internal System error has occurred.
[More details] http://opensuse-education.org/download/repo/1.0/11.0/download/repo/1.0/11.0 Valid Metadata not found at specified URL(s)

I find that I am now unable to ‘see’ any of the Windows based machines on my home network. The Windows Network icon shows 0 items. This was working fine yesterday.

(Perhaps I should also say that prior to setting up Evolution I had been following a trouble shooting guide, found through the OpenSuSE SDB, which required me to download and run a couple of scripts that would tell me more about the codec in the soundcard which I am (currently) unable to use.)

My Linux PC is essentially unusable now. I didn’t realise that OpenSuSE and important supporting applications were so terribly fragile, such that a (most likely) mistake by an end-user can break the PC. I expected that a lot more integration testing than this would have been done.

This sort of vulnerability disqualifies OpenSuSE from being used by non-technical end-users like myself.

It seems to me that I have no option but to re-install the whole thing and start again - or is there some technical guru out there who can take me through an effective PSI process?

#2

Reading your post it makes me think more along the lines that something has happened thats reset or mucked up your network settings and that is affecting all other services…

To check this would you please post output of;

/sbin/ifconfig
/sbin/route

cat /etc/resolv.conf

dig

Thanks,
Wj

#3

Thanks for this.

I too was quite surprised at the range of loss of function so I had a look elsewhere. It seems like a cable failure between computer and router on home network (stress fracture I guess because it’s a 20 metre cable running down a stair way). I replaced cable and everything is back to normal (aside from fact that I have deleted Evolution!).

I am surprised that I didn’t get any meaningful warning information that I was suffering from a lack of network access. Under Windows the network icon changes. Is it possible to get some sort of equivalent under Linux? If not, is there some place that I should be looking to check that my network is ‘healthy’?

#4

(/sbin/)ifconfig <interface name>
&
ethtool <interface name>

are tools that give good info on the status and errors of your nic (note: ethtool needs to be run as root).

Other than that I would not know of such tools. Maybe NetworkManager has this functionality but not that I’ve seen (haven’t had a jittering cable in a long time thankfully).

Maybe others have good suggestions on this…

#5

You should have also received a message in /var/log/messages saying that your interface has lost link. IE:

Jun 26 14:46:18 linux-scuq kernel: tg3: eth0: Link is down.

You must be root to view this log as it is the main system log. You can also view this log from YaST under Miscellaneous->System Log.