1044025 - gogoinflight.com inaccessible in firefox, fine in chrome

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1041511

(Core :: Networking: DNS, defect)

Description

[Kyle Simpson]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2014-07-25 at 8.00.33 AM.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140723030202

Steps to reproduce:

For the last week or two (I fly a lot), I've been unable to access "gogoinflight.com" (their captive pay portal for wifi) from my firefox nightly browser while flying on gogo-wifi enabled flights (American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, etc).

I did try to restart browser, clear cache, etc. No luck.

However, once I connect to wifi through another browser, then I can surf the web just fine in firefox while in flight. It's only "gogoinflight.com" that fails to load.


Actual results:

See screenshots. "gogoinflight.com" fails to load at all, no matter what I do, in my FF nightly. But it loads fine in Chrome nightly.


Expected results:

I should be able to get to "gogoinflight.com" captive portal through FF.

Comment 1

[Kyle Simpson]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2014-07-25 at 8.01.51 AM.png

screenshot showing FF nightly working once wifi portal has been processed in Chrome and I'm connected to the internet.

Comment 2

[Kyle Simpson]

NOTE: I realize how nearly-impossible this will be to reproduce/triage/fix, since it's dependent on conditions on the airplane. :(

Comment 3

[Jesper Hansen]

I am going to take a shot at that it is your dns Cache in firefox itself. 
iirc, then this time is normally set to 60 minutes.

There's this addon to clear dns cache: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dns-flusher/
Could you try it next time to see if it works?

Comment 4

[Kyle Simpson]

(In reply to Jesper Hansen from comment #3)
> I am going to take a shot at that it is your dns Cache in firefox itself. 
> iirc, then this time is normally set to 60 minutes.
> 
> There's this addon to clear dns cache:
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dns-flusher/
> Could you try it next time to see if it works?

Yes, I will happily try that next time (another flight in a few days).

Does clearing the cache not clear the DNS cache? I was under the impression that it did. It certainly clears things like HTTP redirect caches. Is there no native way in FF to clear the DNS cache, only through the add-on?

Comment 5

[Jesper Hansen]

I read that it did clear the dns cache in earlier versions but seems that part of cache isn't cleared anymore

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

There's also the fact that Chrome has its own DNS stub thingy, which may or may not play a role here, if the DNS on the plane is dead or broken, if Chrome looked it up before...

Some of these wifi portals are served locally, and some are not (for instance, on Dutch national railways, the initial landing pages are served from the train, but then they redirect you to sign in (after ticking the t&c checkbox) to t-mobile's landing pages (as they operate the wifi service) which are remote). I don't know what gogoinflightwifi uses - but if the landing page is served from a small server on the plane, it's quite possible the DNS for the domain is different all the time while on a plane vs. when on the ground, which would run into DNS caching issues.

It would therefore also be useful to have some nslookup output from a terminal while on a plane. From Google's public DNS on my BT landline, the answer I get is:

gkruitbosch-16516:fx-team gkruitbosch$ nslookup airborne.gogoinflight.com
Server:		8.8.8.8
Address:	8.8.8.8#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	airborne.gogoinflight.com
Address: 12.130.115.15

which is identical to my local forwarding DNS (which I think hooks up to BT):

gkruitbosch-16516:fx-team gkruitbosch$ nslookup airborne.gogoinflight.com
Server:		192.168.1.254
Address:	192.168.1.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	airborne.gogoinflight.com
Address: 12.130.115.15

Comment 7

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

there is a decent chance this is a regression from 354493. I backed that out on inbound but it hasn't hit m-c yet. hopefully it will backed out of the 7/26 nightly - are you in a position to retest.

ironically I write this from an airport right now - but gogoinflight won't be offered to me to try.

Comment 8

[Kyle Simpson]

I will be on a plane again Sunday morning, and can try then. Will it just be the nightly that I test with? I don't have custom builds of FF set up on my laptop.

Comment 9

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

yep, just make sure to update nightly and include the source line from about:buildconfig when you report back so we can be sure which code you were running. thanks!

Comment 10

[Kyle Simpson]

OK, I tried again on both my flights today, and in both cases, Firefox connected just fine. I didn't do anything with the DNS flushing (though I do now have the add-on installed in case I need it in the future).