Silly Gnome DNS lookups

I don't know why Gnome insists on doing a DNS lookup every time you open an application. KDE probably does the same. If for some reason your internet goes down you can't open any applications. Try this, just disconnect the network cable and try to open something. It sits there like an idiot. When you have unreliable internet service like roadrunner this can be very annoying. One weekend their DNS server took 10 seconds for every request. It's annoying to wait 10 second to open your

Although this is an *.advocacy group, helping people is good advocacy, so....:

Is your machines' hostname set up in /etc/hosts? Probably the simplest setup would be to have the following in there:

127.0.0.1 localhost yourhostname.yourdomainname yourhostname

See if that helps.

Regards, Nic.

I already have the machines hostname in /etc/hosts. Of course this only is any help if I keep getting the same IP address from the DHCP server (also unreliable). Doing a pointless DNS lookup when opening an application seems like something Microsoft would do.

Err... 127.0.0.1 always points to your machine. Read his post again. Now it is curious as to _why_ there's a DNS lookup needed. Anybody here got any ideas? Suppose you could try looking in the source code.

<guessing> Something to do with CORBA?

Yep. The process is called gnome-name-server. You can see it advertises CORBA services whenever you start up a Gnome app. Check your syslog for details. However, his system is still misconfigured, as my system doesn't seem to do DNS lookups over the internet. My guess is that it indeed has to do with a possibly misconfigured /etc/hosts or /etc/resolv.conf

One thing to try is running 'netconf', select 'name server specification' and make sure 'DNS is required for normal operation' is not ticked - this should give up looking for DNS quicker if not found (and not look for it when starting a second application).

My configuration is the default configuration for Mandrake 7.2, 8.0. If I'm not connected to the internet everything is fine. When I'm connected to the internet gnome goes to the internet for DNS everytime i open an app. Having the IP in the host doesn't prevent it. I know because my firewall logs everything. The major problem arises if the internet goes down like roadrunner does alot. Gnome becomes completely unable to open apps. I have to reboot without the internet to get it running again.

I have the default configuration for Mandrake 7.2, 8.0 using DHCP with roadrunner cable internet.

Hmm,

I must admit that I don't know the slightest thing on how Mandrake handles that. Gnome as packaged by Debian doesn't show that behaviour, but then Debian maintainers tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to net related stuff. Have you tried asking in Mandrake related forums? Or the Gnome users list?