10 Hour Fix

Today I spent 10 hrs fixing my hostname.

I had just bought the domain stebalien.com and was fiddling around with my network settings with network-admin and found the domain box. I typed in my new domain to see what the setting did. Nothing happened for a while so I erased the setting and changed the hosts file back to its origional state (without the domain name). Later, while I was using firefox, my session crashed. I logged back in and received this error:

(process:6725): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

(process:6729): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

I was consequently logged out. This error had nothing to do with the hostname so I assumed that one of my files had been corrupted. After reinstalling half of my system (sudo aptitude reinstall packages) and looking through all of my configuration files I finally logged in using startx. I was immediately logged back out with a hostname internal error. I spent another hour going over my host configuration files (/etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, ...) and all of my DNS configuration files. I finally logged back in using the Failsafe Terminal, typed in sudo network-admin and re-added my domain name, logged back out and in, and my session did not crash. I then proceeded to launch firefox. The page did not load. I could ping, tracerout, and use elinks (a text based web browser for the console) but I Firefox would not load any website. I tinkered with my network-admin settings for 15 minuets before I finally realized that I had a backup of my network-admin settings. I restored my settings and proceeded to write this blog post. I am still clueless as to what my problem was but am happy that it was at least fixed.