When trying to launch Steam from the command line, what is the output? The best place for the output is a gist (located at the top of the github page) and hooking us up with that link may help reveal some of the issue.
Here you go. I did this before, and didn't see anything too obvious, but I also don't really know what I'm looking for either. Other comments: I use wicd for my network manager, all other applications seem to work fine with no connection problems.
Out of curiousity... you ever have NMClient (Network Manager) installed?
For about 5 minutes, until apt-get install wicd && apt-get remove --purge networkmanager finished running shortly after I provisioned the system a year and a half ago. :-)
So to answer your implied question, there have been no changes to the networking management daemon I use, and Steam worked before. Only changes that I made were a switch in ISP and the necessary change in networking gear, and from what I can tell it isn't that because the Windows Steam client works on the same system when I boot into Windows. I thought that maybe it was the fact that I renumbered my NAT but I re-re-numbered the NAT back to a 192.168.0.1/24 and there was no change.
I also created a new user on the system called steam-test and updated steam and ran it, still no connection, still same offline-mode-only. Sadness ensued.
Are you using the latest package from today? I don't think it'll change anything for you but it did have a fix for an unusual network situation.
So I just removed everything steam related and attempted a re-installation, blew away configs and such, saved SteamApps and userdata thinking those I can use later.
steam-launcher will connect to somewhere and download a new client update, but still refuses to connect when the client starts and since my login information is gone now I can't log in to offline mode.
I blew away ~/.steam, ~/.local/share/Steam and ~/Steam. Is there anywhere else it saves state to?
Also installed network-manager since it apparently wanted it and still no change.
The logs are strangely silent on this one.
New gist with the log is here:
https://gist.github.com/rawsonj/9a760d7a8847c5c1d285
Today's client beta has some changes in this area and may (or may not) help you.
So just to double check, is there a walkthrough somewhere to make sure I'm updating right?
I keep rm -rf .steam and .local/share/Steam, then grabbing steam_latest.deb from the website and dpkg -P steam-launcher && dpkg -i steam_latest.deb and getting nowhere.
That is still the beta client, correct? Am I missing something?
Whether you're using a beta package or not is controlled by the presence of ~/.local/share/Steam/package/beta. If that file exists you will be in the beta, otherwise not.
The existence of that file doesn't seem to matter. After touching it the steam client doesn't update and I still can't login because it doesn't think that it can contact the steam network. Reinstalling and creating that file before running the launcher doesn't do anything either.
Interestingly, I can go through the motions to create a new account, and even recover the password on my existing account, but when it tries to log in to the steam network it still fails.
Is there an UPDATE=1 variable I can set to force the update after touching the beta file?
Whatever it is, its an Ubuntu problem. Installed Steam on my Arch laptop last night and it had no problems connecting at all.
I tried disabling IPv6 last night thinking it might have a very low timeout threshold and dying on IPv6 but that didn't help either.
There's no way to force an update since it'll update on its own if it can connect properly. There'll be some changes in this area in the next few months which may or may not fix the original issue. It's good to hear that you have things working.
Yeah, it would just be nice if it was working on the gaming box. :)
Having isolated the issue to Ubuntu is promising though.
Dammit ubuntu--, it was DNS.
Resolvconf was configured for old network settings and wasn't updating for new network settings. DNS had to time out a couple times before it could resolve anything. What's strange is that although general internet seemed a little slow, there was no messages anywhere about what was going on, as indicated by the gist's I posted earlier.
Maybe the launcher should have a more verbose message about whats going on instead of just "Cannot connect to the steam network?"
Nothing extracted yet.
Changed ISPs from centurylink to comcast and renumbered our home NAT to a 172.16.0.0/12 and Steam refuses to connect. Tried to open ports on the router, reinstall Steam, set IP in hosts file in case #2347 but doesn't seem to be that. Using ubuntu 12.04 x64.