Ubuntu – Facebook and Gmail stop working after 10 minutes

10.1064-bitfirefoxgoogle-chromenetworking

I have problems with facebook and gmail only: It works fine and lets me log in, view the content, read new messages, etc. But after 5-10 minutes it doesn't load at all:

This webpage is not available.

The webpage at
http://www.facebook.com/ might be
temporarily down or it may have moved
permanently to a new web address.

More information on this error Below
is the original error message

Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET):
Unknown error

After deleting cookies this problem disappears for 5-10 minutes, then I get the same error. It happens with Google Chrome and Firefox. Ping works fine.

I have checked System → Preferences → Network Proxy, it's set to the default: "Direct Internet Connection". Then I ran the test at chrome://net-internals/#tests and got some "FAIL" results

  • Use system proxy settings
  • Disable IPv6 host resolving
  • Probe for IPv6 host resolving

IPv6 is disabled.

Best Answer

Some troubleshooting ideas :

Start a terminal and run watch -d -n 20 dig www.facebook.com. Then, the moment that gmail or facebook shows the error, ALT-TAB to your terminal window and watch the next update for any changes. I'm guessing that these sites have load balancers in place that are changing the IP addresses behind the scenes. It's possible that your ISP is caching the content without your knowledge and your cookie is becoming invalid because the content being provided by your ISP is no longer a match for the connection being made by your browser.

watch -d -n 20 dig www.facebook.com

You might be able to circumvent this by changing your DNS servers. Try right clicking on nm-applet, then choose "Edit Connections". Choose your ethernet connection (probably "auto eth0"), then "Edit". Go to the IPv4 settings and change "Automatic DHCP" to "Automatic DHCP (addresses only)".

Editing auto eth0

All your going to change is the DNS entries - either use Google's entries (enter 8.8.8.8, 4.4.4.4), or OpenDNS (enter 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220)

I suppose the other option for possibly circumventing such a time-out is to run Gmail over https. Not sure if Facebook supports fully encrypted sessions. To set Gmail to use https, go to your account settings at the top-right of the page, then in the General tab, find the "Use HTTPS" option and select it.

Gmail Settings

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