Weird Problems in Fedora

From: Jonathan Marc Bearak (jonathanbearak_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/09/03 

Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2003 02:22:50 GMT

I installed Fedora last night and have been having serious problems. I
managed to resolve them to a degree, but am extremely confused as to this
whole situation.

At first I thought that maybe there was some sort of file corruption
issue, even though I checked the discs, so I downloaded all the RPMs, went
into single-user, and installed them (rpm --replace-pkgs -Uvh *.rpm).
That did nothing. So I kept searching.

Here's the first problem: ifup will not work. I noticed it was a script
and, reading the bash manual page, was able to get a basic understanding
of what it was doing. There is a check_link_down line that, if true,
exits with the error message "failed; no link present. Check cable?" I
have no idea what check_link_down is. But I did notice that later on,
above echo "done", was the line of code that seemed to call dhclient to
bring up eth0.
"if [ -x /sbin/dhclient ] && /sbin/dhclient ${DHCLIENTARGS} ${DEVICE} "
That's line 292. The failed message is on the lines 274-278. Commenting
those lines out,
    #if check_link_down ${DEVICE}; then
        #echo $" failed; no link present. Check cable?"
        #ip link set dev ${DEVICE} down >/dev/null 2>&1
        #exit 1
    #fi
makes ifup work. Is it possible that those lines
should be somewhere lower in the ifup script? As far as I can tell those
lines execute *before* ifup even tries to bring my computer online.

Does anyone who has a greater understanding of this than myself know
what's going on with ifup?

The next problem, *sort of* resolved, occurs throughout many apps. I.e.,
I could not type in Mozilla's location bar, or Mozilla crashes; and when I
try to exit GNOME, the panel crashes. It occurs only when I'm online.
The fix was to undo my hostname modifications. Here's what caused the
problem: I added "jonathan" to /etc/hosts in front of
localhost.localdomain, and in the file /etc/sysconfig/network, changed
"HOSTNAME=" to "HOSTNAME=jonathan". This is, of course, the same as I've
done in Redhat 8.0 and 9. For whatever reason, however, it messes things
up in Fedora, because removing these lines and rebooting fixed the
Mozilla/GNOME crashes. Therefore, I say "sort of" resolved because while
these apps now work, I don't see why I shouldn't be able to change my
hostname to "jonathan" as I've always done. What is different in Fedora
that makes setting my hostname in that manner mess things up? Meanwhile,
in the "Fedora -> Setting -> Network" configuration tool, when I
double-click on "eth0" under the "Devices" tab, the "hostname (optional)"
field still says "jonathan". If I erase this and press OK, and then
re-open that window, it says "jonathan" again -- very weird.

What should I do to set my hostname in Fedora without causing all these
weird problems?

The third problem is with elinks. Asking elinks to bring up a website by
IP address works fine, but if I type in a hostname like "google.com" or
"redhat.com", elinks crashes, and I have to kill it with top (it stays
open even after I close the terminal window.) As it crashes, elinks'
status bar reads, "Looking up host." What is wrong with elinks?

Thanks in advance.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Problem setting hostname for PC running Fedora.
    ... I'm still unable to set the hostname satisfactorily on my ... the other has Fedora Core. ... I get an error dialog saying that my network name was not found ... I am still not able to successfully change my hostname. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: hostname doesnt stick
    ... Fedora likes to put the machine name into the 127.0.0.1 ... I've done three FC4 installs and a rawhide install, ... included the box's hostname every time. ... checked for it first thing ever since that first time. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: flash crash in firefox on youtube
    ... > On my 2 Fedora 8 systems, I have this problem today for the first ... I see the same crash consistently on my laptop running F8 i386 with ... Googling around I read that those crashes were caused by a race ... in "plugins", make a difference? ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: what to do after an IP change
    ... > The reason I ask is because after the IP change, ... > send from a hostname that was no longer valid. ... Give your Fedora host a name ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Hostname and Server Name
    ... > servername in HTTP configuration,and when I tried to access the server from ... The hostname you set in Fedora is something you can choose freely. ...
    (Fedora)