o1bigtenor via Dng said on Wed, 8 Nov 2023 16:06:49 -0600

>Greetings
>
>A few days ago I had a strange problem show up.
>I use firefox-esr for most of my browser work

Is there a particular reason you use Firefox? My experience is that of
all the browsers that can render halfway valid HTML5, Firefox is the
slowest and glitchiest. I use mainly qutebrowser these days.

>(have far too many
>windows and on some of those (very few) a plethora of tabs). Also have
>another 4 browsers that are used for a minimal amount of pages

Lots of open browser tabs is the kiss of death for efficiently working
in X without frequent prophylactic restarts of X.

>(they
>don't play nice on a reboot!).

The preceding is a problem you should solve one way or another. Not
playing nice on reboot indicates a basic problem, not a symptom to be
coathangered.

>
>I was using a program called 'Libby' to read a book whilst I was
>eating lunch. Page freezes and firefox-esr is totally unresponsive.
>Try some other tabs (ones I use a lot) to see if I could get
>connectivity. Nothing wants to connect just see various bluto graphics
>to tell you that its hunting a connection.
>(Tried likely 1/2 dozen different tabs just in case it was the other
>end that was the issue.)
>Checked with each of the other 4 browsers and each one could connect
>to at least one outside site and 'work'.
>After about 23 or 24 minutes firefox-esr is now connecting again.

Well wait a minute. You haven't begun to narrow it down to anything.
You don't know whether or not your Internet connection is intermittent.
You don't know whether or not the problem is in Firefox. Or in Libby.

>Called my ISP but all I'm allowed to talk to are level 1 techs so they
>had never even heard of
>something like this. They emailed level 2 but I haven't heard anything
>in some 3 days so my guess
>is that they think I'm just a crank. (I think their support model is
>appropriate for a kindergarten.)

What you need to do is write a simple shellscript that does

ping -q -c1 > /dev/null || write_log_file_with_time

It should have a loop that does the preceding (which I haven't tested)
once per second, and just leave it running to see what's happening with
your connectivity.

By the way, if you get interruptions, you need to test whether the
interruptions are caused by your firewall/router or by your ISP. If you
find out you have a highly intermittent connection with the ISP, find a
way to get the log to them so they don't think you're in Kindergarten.

>
>Is there anyone out there that has any idea what might have caused my
>service interruption?

At this point, anything given you would be pure speculation. You need a
process, not an answer.

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21