I notice that my box running Mandrake 9.2 does a DNS lookup for its own hostname (in this case "linux-box") every time it starts an X application. I'm talking about ANY application, not just those that need Internet access. This causes my box to take a LONG time to load any X app whenever my ISP's DNS server is slow, or whenever my cable connection goes down. This is really frustrating since it goes down often, and I'm left with an almost useless box (i.e. SLOW box). Is there any way I can bypass this? It's mind-boggling to me (a Linux newbie) why Mandrake has to rely on an outside server just to load an app. Please help me, anyone!

well i would assume that it is because it is connecting the X server, which is very much network aware, due to being client - server based. for a DNS lookup, it would first hit /etc/hosts, in order to resolve the hostname, failing that it then goes to the name servers in /etc/resolv.conf i would guess that you just bneed to add an entry to /etc/hosts so it will always instantly resolve the relevant hostname to itself. it is normal for the x applications to default to "localhost", i.e. loopback on 127.0.0.1, rather than the actual hostname itself, but that'd be the obviosu culprit.

Wow, when I first read what you posted I thought to myself "well duh, you don't think I already tried that?" But I tried it anyway, and wow, that fixed it! Yaaayyy...thank you so much. I honestly remember playing with my hosts file and adding something that would make it recognize its own host name. I guess that was just in my dream then. Thank you once again, you prevented a newbie from reverting back to Windoze. Now I just wonder why Mandrake didn't do this by default when I set up the local host name.

I have another problem though: sometimes DNS resolves also take a long time from any browser. I know this isn't a problem with my ISP since when I do a DNS lookup from any of my Windows boxes at that same time, it works smoothly. I thought this was related to my first problem (apps starting up slow), but my adding my own host name to my hosts file didn't fix this one. What I've noticed is this happens once every hour or so, and it lasts for about 2-3 minutes, then everything goes back to normal again. When I try to access the Webmin server on my Linux box from another computer, it also loads up very slowly. But this doesn't seem to affect Samba accesses to my linux box. Weird huh? Do you have any idea what could be causing this? I know a bunch of people have posted this same question over the past few months, but none of the proposed solutions have worked (including turning off various services that seemed useless to me). Thanks in advance.

Oh yeah, sorry for the multiple postings.