Ubuntu

GAIM and R cannot connect to servers

Asked by Neil Hepburn

Just recently (ie today I guess) I have not been able to connect to certain internet resources. Gaim cannot connect to msn, ICQ, or yahoo. Also, I use R - a statistical package (installed from Ubuntu repositories) and it has the ability to download additional packages from CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) repositories. This isn't working either. However, this computer is a dual-boot with Windows XP and so I booted into windows and tried each of these things under windows and everything works. Thus, I suspect it is a problem with Ubuntu (Feisty). Other internet things seem fine -- email, web browsers, newsreaders all work fine. I suspect that ports are being blocked somewhere - but where?

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Neil Hepburn
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Lorenzo (lorenzo-delledonne) said : 		#1

Have you installed a firewall recently (eg. Firestarter)?

Revision history for this message
Neil Hepburn (nhepburn) said : 		#2

No I haven't. However, I did install Aegis anti-virus from repositories but that has since been removed.

Revision history for this message
Neil Hepburn (nhepburn) said : 		#3

This is sort of solved now. I decided to reinstall Ubuntu but I did not wipe my /home partition. When I logged in, the problem persisted. It occurred to me that the only thing that was common across the old installation and the new was my user folder. I created a new user with all the same permissions as my old user folder and then logged in as that new user and everything worked. Thus, the problem is user-specific.

Revision history for this message
Lorenzo (lorenzo-delledonne) said : 		#4

That's quite odd. I can't figure out what it is by this few clues... However, it should happen because of a bad configuration file or an application running in background.
If it's still a problem for you, keep waiting for a response, otherwise just close this question :)

Revision history for this message
Best Neil Hepburn (nhepburn) said : 		#5

We can close this now. I'm not sure what the exact cause of the problem was (which configuration file), but the cure was to delete my user folder and create a new empty folder and then log in so that Ubuntu would go through set up all of the stuff from scratch. Hmmmmm, puzzling.