programs freeze for 1-2 minutes [SOLVED]

[cristi1979]

I have a very strange problem.

If I have set an IP address on eth0 and no cable pluged in my PC, when I try to start some programs, they freeze for 1-2 minutes, but after that period they start with no problem.

The programs with this behaviour are: cupsd, mc, ooffice2 and an other one from when kde starts(no idea wich one, but when I log in kde I have the same problem).
There is no activity after the programs are launched. It's like they are waiting for something and a timer expires.

If I remove /etc/resolv.conf the problem dissapears. The same if I put the interface down.

Here are the times the programs need to load with the net cable unpluged first and after with the cable pluged:

cristi@Gentoo-laptop ~ $ time mc
real 2m1.680s
user 0m0.048s
sys 0m0.021s
cristi@Gentoo-laptop ~ $ time mc
real 0m1.828s
user 0m0.045s
sys 0m0.021s


Gentoo-laptop cristi # time cupsd
real 1m0.095s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.001s
Gentoo-laptop cristi # time cupsd
real 0m0.944s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.001s

From what I saw, the only libraries in common for those programs are libdl and libc, both from glibc. I have this problem for more that 6 months now and I started to see it in FC6 also.

Any ideas?

Help??

[JRV]

These programs are obviously trying to resolve something via DNS and then run into a timeout because your cable isn't plugged in. When the interface is down or there is no /etc/resolv.conf, there is no timeout, as the lack of connectivity/name resolution is noticed right away.

If you are interested in what the programs try to resolve or connect to, use either "strace -f" or a network sniffer such as Ethereal (now called Wireshark) to inspect the traffic caused by the programs.

You can also change the DNS resolver timeout value to something smaller in /etc/resolv.conf (look at "man resolv.conf" and search for the timeout option):

For example, to set the DNS timeout to 10 seconds and only try twice, add this line to your /etc/resolv.conf:

[cristi1979]

I have searched some more and the solution was to fix dnsdomain.
I have edited /etc/hosts to have for localhost the same as in /etc/conf.d/hostname.
Thank you for the answer.

... stupid linux with stupid problems...
I suffered for more than 6 months with this...