Hello everybody!
Lately I've been having problems connecting to various sites that I have visited and used regularly for more than 20 years. For example, I get blocked from even viewing pages on the Internet Archive (archive.org), and can only find download links by searching the onion version of DDG. Then I can usually download, using wget over Tor, though sometimes I have to wait; sometimes I have to change my useragent from nothing to something, and that helps, but I still get messages that condemn me as another "AI bot" that is "ruining the web for everybody"; although, as far as I can recall, I've been doing it like this for most of those past 20 years.
Anyway, a little online research yielded the recommendations that I try entering a useragent in the appropriate place in wget; which I did, and which helps, but only sometimes.
Another suggestion was that I ought to try changing my DNS servers. Most pages recommended Google's servers as the default, but I mostly have relied upon OpenDNS, when I have had time to fiddle around with such things, when I can spend enough time online.
I have used OpenDNS before, so it's not unfamiliar to me. I reviewed their pages to see what has changed, and updated by settings accordingly.
I edited my file (not including my own remarks in brackets) in /etc/resolv.conf like so:
nameserver 208.67.222.222 nameserver 208.67.220.220 #[ipv6 redirect to ipv4] #nameserver ::ffff:d043:dede #nameserver ::ffff:d043:dcdc #nameserver ::ffff:d043:dedc #nameserver ::ffff:d043:dcde #[ipv6] # nameserver 2620:119:35::35 # nameserver 2620:119:53::53 # ipv6 - RFC compliant - no filtering # nameserver 2620:0:ccc::2 # nameserver 2620:0:ccd::2
As I have disabled ipv6 at present, you see that those lines are commented out. I will enable ipv6 again when I know more about it to adjust my firewall and security settings appropriately. Otherwise, you see above that there are addresses for ipv6 as well as to redirect ipv6 to ipv4.
After changing my settings as described above, I restart nscd or sometimes even reboot, but when I check my /etc/resolv.conf, it says that my "original" settings have been restored by networkmanager:
# Generated by NetworkManager search lan nameserver 10.246.172.1
I tried changing permissions to rw, but this doesn't help. As I understand it, tdenetworkmanager depends on networkmanager, which is to say Google, I believe. I went into network settings in the Trinity Control Manager (TCC > Internet & Network > Network Settings), created different profiles, and so on, but it does no good. I ended up not being able to connect to internet at all, and could not restore my original settings even though I am scrupulous about backing up before I make changes.
I ended up having to reinstall my system, and now I am back in the same place; unable to connect to some sites, notably archive.org.
At the moment I cannot tell if this is * a problem with my own configuration * a problem with the sites themselves (e.g., archive.org may have changed things) * a problem with the tdenetworkmanager (which has been crashing more often over the past few months) * a problem with the networkmanager that is a dependency for the tdenetworkmanager * my DNS servers are misconfigured in /etc/resolv.conf or in my network settings * a problem with my local network (over which I have no control, and which goes down a lot) * something else ...
There are some other issues to discuss under other headings; not directly related to this problem or problems. I will bring those matters up separately.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, so that I can be free again.
Bill