CentOS - Dec 2008 - flash fails to work on Los Angeles Times website - fix

Hello,

I have a 32-bit install of C5.2 on my Intel Centrino Laptop (2005).
The Adobe flash plugin works fine in Firefox in all cases except on the Los
Angeles Times website http://www.latimes.com.

I was baffled by this for a few months, since it works on another 32-bit C5.2
box. When I realized that the only real difference was that the laptop had no
LAMP install, and both had the same elaborate set of hosts redirects (to avoid
adverts), it seemed reasonable that the /etc/hosts file might be the culprit.

Sure enough, both boxes had this line in the redirects
----------- /etc/hosts ------------
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
----------- end snip ---------

I could see that flash was hanging on the laptop when it looked for a response
from ad.doubleclick.net

In order to fix the bug, I commented out the line. Flash now worked!
In order to avoid the advert, I changed 127.0.0.1, to another private LAMP
install on my home network (192.168.1.104). Problem solved.

At the very least this redirect needs to return a response, or the flash video
will hang and never start. This is true for the LA Times implementation of
adverts, at least. Maybe your newspaper sites behave similarly.

My 2cents worth of troubleshooting,
Mark

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 7:13 PM, Mark Pryor <tlviewer at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a 32-bit install of C5.2 on my Intel Centrino Laptop (2005).
> The Adobe flash plugin works fine in Firefox in all cases except on the Los
Angeles Times website http://www.latimes.com.
>
> I was baffled by this for a few months, since it works on another 32-bit
C5.2 box. When I realized that the only real difference was that the laptop had
no LAMP install, and both had the same elaborate set of hosts redirects (to
avoid adverts), it seemed reasonable that the /etc/hosts file might be the
culprit.
>
> Sure enough, both boxes had this line in the redirects
> ----------- /etc/hosts ------------
> 127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
> ----------- end snip ---------
>
That's not a CentOS bug.  That's a bug with your local configuration.
I don't understand what you want CentOS people to do here.  Is this
hosts entry actually added by a package?  If so, that's the real bug
here.

--Russell