Netscape 4.73 only access intranet.

[Richard Rose]

Using HPUX 11 and HP's Netscape 4.73, the system will only access intranet web sites. Giving netscape a internet site, www.yahoo.com, results in a error message.

A network error occured:
unable to connect to the server
the server may be down or unreachable.

Try connecting again later.

Other OS's are not experiencing this problem. What did I forget to setup?

[David Lin_1]

Do you have any proxy server in your site?
If yes, Bring in up the netscape browser and click on Preferences from Edit menu.
Click on Advanced, then Proxies.
Click on Manual proxy configuration, then View.
You should be able to enter your HTTP proxy IP there.

[Richard Rose]

We do not use HTTP proxy. The company's web servers are socks or automatic proxy. These values are set the same as other OS's that are working without problems. Thanks.

[David Lin_1]

If you are using auto proxy, there's an Automatic proxy configuration option.
You can enter Configuration location(URL) there.

[Richard Rose]

Thanks, thats the way it is setup. This configuration on any other OS works fine. Its the HPUX that is experiencing a problem. I need to find what HPUX needs that is different.

[David Lin_1]

Have you take a look of /etc/nsswitch.conf file and "nslookup yahoo.com" to see what's the response?

[Richard Rose]

nslookup yahoo.com responds with:
# nslookup yahoo.com
Name Server: sjnmsrv1.sanjose.ibm.com
Address: 9.113.42.250

Trying DNS
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: yahoo.com
Addresses: 204.71.200.243, 204.71.200.245

As for /etc/nsswitch.conf there isn't one. Only a /etc/nsswitch.compat. That is to be copied to make /etc/nsswitch.conf. Just use the default values?
We are a DCE-DFS environment, not NFS/NIS. We are a TCP enviroment, not a udp environment, if that makes a difference.

[Richard Rose]

After creating /etc/nsswitch.conf, the error message from Netscape has changed to:

Netscape unable to locate server www.yahoo.com.
Please check the server name and try again.

What is this trying to tell me?

[Jim Welch]

Netscape Communicator on HPUX works just the same as on a PC. If you have the proxy configuation correctly configured, it should use the proxy (http proxy or socks) to access remote servers. I seem to remember a problem with socks servers and communicator on hpux, however, depending on what software was installed on the system. If you are using a socks server as your proxy, that might be part of the problem.

[Richard Rose]

Netscape's working the same as it does on the PC and any other UNIX box is what I assumed. But, this one had to be different. The socks and autoproxy servers are the same ones that are working elsewhere in the site for AIX, SUN, and MS. The system that is the problem child is a HPUX 11.0 using the Netscape version from the HP's software site. Netscape 4.73 for HPUX 11.0. What do you think needs to be set in the socks.conf file for the HP to function properly? The socks server is working, since I am typing this. Other OS's on the same subnet are able to access the internet.