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I'm KDE user (3.1.4 - it's kind of an old version, but it worked just perfectly for me) on a FreeBSD machine and nowadays I'm expreriencing some problems with the Konqueror Web Browser - Konqueror just refuses to visualize or load some web sites that it used to load and visualise just fine a couple of weeks before.
I was on a vacation for a couple of weeks, sadly without my computer. The computer was shutted down for this period of time. So, I suppose there is some kind of caching issue I'm not aware of.(I'm sure I don't have proxy problems, because my ISP isn't using pransparent proxies.)
Maybe in this period of time, the contents of the cache has expired...
I tryed to disable the usage of the cache from the Konqueror configuration dialog. I also tryed to clean the cache. But nothing happened - Konqueror still refuses to load or visualize some web sites (e.g. http://www.FreeBSD.org/ - which is perfectly accessible at that time from another browser on my machine).
I played with the rest of the options in the Konqueror configuration dialog, but nothing changes.
I've cleaned the history and all cookies, but nothing changes.
I've tried to clean the cache manualy, I've located the cache at
~/.kde/share/cache/http/
and I removed the contents of the http directory. And still I had the same results.
Am I omitting something?
Is there someone with a similar problem and a solution?

Best Regards,
CASIUS

I continued investigating this irritating problem of mine in the following way:
1. When I'm connecting to a web-site (from those that Konqueror can't visualize or load - e.q. http://www.FreeBSD.org/) in the status bar I'm reading: "www.FreeBSD.org contacted Waiting for reply..." and after this nothing happens. Absolutely no web-contents have been downloaded. So I suppose I'm facing not a HTML-rendering problem, but a HTTP-problem.
2. I run the kdebugdialog, then locate areas 7103 (kio_http) and 7113 (kio_http_debug), I activated them (checked the checkkey), then pressed OK.
3. Next, I restartedd the X windowing system in the following way (the following command is only suited for csh and tcsh users):
# startx > & ! ~/xsession.log
This command simply redirects the standart output (known as stdout), along with the diagnostic output (known as stderr) to the xsession.log file in my home directory.
xsession.log will gather all the debugging information during this X-session, and also the debug output when I try to open Konqueror onto the problematic web-sites. Investigating the contents of this file must help to discover the problem or the bug (but later as I read the contents of the file I couldn't find what was wrong - there simply wasn't useful information).
4. Then I discovered the kio_http_cache_cleaner command, and I thought that's it, now I'm going to clean the cache and everything will be just fine. I run:
# kio_http_cache_cleaner --clear-all
and...
Nothing changes - I still had the same problems.
So maybe it's not a caching problem???

Best Regards,
CASIUS

I've discovered that there is no KDEHOME environment variable defined on my sistem when I ran the command:
# printenv | grep KDE

So, the next thing I did was to set this environment variable:
# setenv KDEHOME $HOME/.kde
(for csh, tcsh users you should add this command to the .cshrc file in the home directory or in the /etc/csh.login file for your system, because there is no export command in this shells, for bash users:
# export KDEHOME="$HOME/.kde"
will suffice)

I thought that the kio_http_cache_cleaner utillity is using actually this environment variable to locate the cache.
Then I ran again:
# kio_http_cache_cleaner --clear-all

But the cache at this location: $HOME/.kde/share/cache/http seems to be untuched.
I found that there is a configuration file for the kio_http applications. The configuration file is located at $HOME/.kde/share/config/kio_httprc
I've editted this file a bit. I've added the following lines:
[http Settings]
CacheDir=$KDEHOME/share/cache/http

Then I ran:
# kio_http_cache_cleaner --clear-all
I got exactly the same results - the cache directory seems to be untuched.

So, my question is what actually does the kio_http_cache_cleaner utillity? And are there any ways to configure it to function correctly?

Best Regards,
CASIUS

P.S. Some remarks on my previous post:
There is no usefull debugging information in the xsession.log file, simply because my KDE is installed from binary packages. In order to receive any diagnostic information you should compile KDE from sources with the proper key (--enable-debug or something like that).

This are excerpts form http://renaud.waldura.com/doc/freebsd/pppoe/ - section 6.3:

A potential problem with the PPPoE configuration manifests itself in the following manner: client systems become unable to access certain Web sites. A Web browser stops in mid-download of pages, or does not access the site at all. Initially quite puzzling, it quickly becomes a major annoyance.

I ran into the problem with various sites, netscape.com, wellsfargo.com and paypal.com. The sites are accessible from the gateway machine, but not from client systems located behind the gateway. A network trace with tcpdump does not show anything abnormal, apart from no packets making their way back to your system.

But let's explain what's going on. Your client systems implement Path MTU Discovery by sending TCP packets with the "Do not fragment" bit set and a large TCP Maximum Segment Size derived from the local MTU value (a complete description of Path MTU Discovery can be found in RFC 1191). Since your clients are connected to an Ethernet, their packets are sent with a MSS = MTU(Ethernet) - 40 = 1460.

Unfortunately, because of the additional encapsulation, your PPPoE link has an MTU smaller than the Ethernet MTU. It is not an issue on the way up, from your client to the Web site, because the client is only sending a HTTP request, which typically fits inside one packet, smaller than the MTU. But on the way back down, the web site is sending large packets (the Web page, or the file, that was requested).

Whenever a data packet larger than the MTU (for the PPPoE link) is received on the ISP router, it drops the packet (the router would fragment the packet, but it cannot because the "Do not fragment" bit is set) and sends a ICMP "Fragmentation needed" message back to the originator (the Web site), telling it to resend smaller packets.

Unfortunately, if that ICMP message does not make it back to the originator of the packet, or is not generated by the router, the originating Web site will not resend those packets, and they will never be received by the client. Sometimes the problem is blocked ICMP traffic, sometimes it is a misconfigured ISP router that does not send ICMP "Frag needed" messages. The end result is the same: the client does not receive the Web page it requested.

So, this is not a KDE or Konqueror issue!

Best Regards,
CASIUS