Why firefox and palemoon can't resolve my home hostnames


asimov-solensan

Very Active Member
Joined
Jan 8, 2010
Messages
732
Hello,

I was curious about this because I have many things at home that I access its hostname but it fails on Pandora.

I have my DNS served by the DHCP configuration and in command-line it just works using nslookup, but then palemoon and firefox are unable to resolve any of my servers. It works in any other linux or android I tested.

Is this a limitation of the PND system? Some options are hardcoded there?

Regards.
 
Hmm I don't think I've encountered that when connecting to my home servers with palemoon, and I use it a bit for http file transfers. I do have a domain name pointing to my home server and it seems to work fine inside and outside my network.
 
Have you tried <servername>.home ? Are your servers and Pandora in the same workgroup?
 
@TrashyMG I didn't explain myself correctly. Your case is a domain name that is accessible from the internet.

I'm talking about servers that can only resolve internally, that's why I need my own DNS server. I'm talking about hostnames in my internal network, they resolve with nslookup but not in the browser.
 
Okay, maybe it's Firefox's DNS Prefetching feature. It's supposed to only be something used to speed up sites that the browser has never connected to yet.

Can disable it in the: about:config page in the browser.

Search for network.dns.disablePrefetch

and click on it.
 
Last edited:
Perhaps look into:
$ cat /etc/hosts
You may see, or not, a local domain name.

This file is not supposed to be set by the network.
 
Have you tried <servername>.home ? Are your servers and Pandora in the same workgroup?

I don't get this. What does a workgrup has to do with DNS. I'm using dnsmasq and can't find anything related to workgroups in documentation.

Okay, maybe it's Firefox's DNS Prefetching feature. It's supposed to only be something used to speed up sites that the browser has never connected to yet.

Can disable it in the: about:config page in the browser.

Search for network.dns.disablePrefetch

and click on it.

This makes no difference, I guess it is disabled in all other computers and still they work.

Perhaps look into:
$ cat /etc/hosts
You may see, or not, a local domain name.

This file is not supposed to be set by the network.

There is nothing besides an entry for 127.0.0.1 in that file. Same with my other linux computers.
 
This makes no difference, I guess it is disabled in all other computers and still they work.
Hmm odd, It should be enabled by default. Remember if it's bold lettering in the about:config then it's disabled, if it's not bold then it's enabled...
 
Do you enter the fully qualified domain name (http://server.local) or just the hostname (http://server)?
When you don`t enter the fqdn, you have to add the "search local" or "domain local" line in /etc/resolv.conf
Linux doesn`t accept a domain name via DHCP that is different from the resolv.conf without for example network manager.
So if it`s different, you have to use fqdn
Also, check if the DNS servers in resolv.conf are the correct oones, that know the internal names.
 
Hmm odd, It should be enabled by default. Remember if it's bold lettering in the about:config then it's disabled, if it's not bold then it's enabled...

Well yes, but you enable an option that disables a feature, hence the option is disabled by default. You enable this options to disable the feature and I was talking about the feature status.

Anyhow I found the problem. First sorry for opening the thread, it was my DNS server since the beginning, but i didn't noticed in more than a year since this worked in all other computers.

Thanks to my tcpdump-fu I noticed that DNS server always returned a non-existent domain, then the computer asked the same hostname without domain and everything worked, but for some reason firefox and palemoon didn't try again and just began to check adding www. at the beginning and thinks like that.

My DHCP server simply assigns a domain that wasn't configured in dnsmasq. I still can't do what I'm trying in Pandora but I guess this deserves his own thread.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.
 
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