midnight commander strange behavior

unclejed613 · 12-18-2013, 08:57 PM

recently i was without internet for a week or so, and during that time mc would take a long time to start up. i did have the machine on a local network though. once i got internet again mc takes about a second to load.... at the same time, i see the message in the terminal window that says "no protocol specified" as mc loads. is mc trying to "phone home" or something? i'm guessing the two are related. where in the settings for mc would i look to change this behavior?

cwizardone · 12-18-2013, 10:13 PM

Something similar has happened with Midnight Commander on my machine. If I open a terminal window, sign-in as root, and then try to run mc it either takes a very long time to start up or it doesn't start at all. Not a problem when I start mc in a terminal window as a user.

cwizardone · 07-14-2016, 12:18 PM

This is still a problem and has been a consistent problem for quite a while.
I just opened a console, as user, and typed, mc, and hit enter. It took 30 seconds for the midnight commander to appear.
It would appear to have something to do with being online at the time.

Using 14.2-current and it doesn't matter if the desktop is Xfce or KDE, the result is the same.

elcore · 07-15-2016, 06:23 AM

Had the exact same problem with both 14.1 and 14.2 packages.
I suggest rebuild with different flags if you don't have network.

Code:

CFLAGS="$SLKCFLAGS" \
./configure \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --sysconfdir=/etc \
  --mandir=/usr/man \
  --localstatedir=/var \
  --docdir=/usr/doc/mc-$VERSION \
  --enable-charset \
  --enable-extcharset \
  --enable-vfs \
  --enable-vfs-tar \
  --enable-vfs-cpio \
  --enable-vfs-extfs \
  --enable-vfs-sfs \
  --disable-netcode \
  --disable-nls \
  --disable-vfs-fish \
  --disable-vfs-smb \
  --disable-vfs-ftp \
  --disable-vfs-sftp \
  --enable-background \
  --with-gpm-mouse \
  --with-x=yes \
  --build=$ARCH-slackware-linux || exit 1

brobr · 07-15-2016, 08:47 AM

I do not see this behavior with /var/log/packages/mc-4.8.16-x86_64-2 coming with Slackware, whether being on- or off-line.

I am on Xfce; with Wicd as networkmanager.

I have seen, though, problems with other filemanagers (Thunar especially) when I had distant file-shares mounted via cifs at the time the computer was sent to sleep (say at work, leaving for the station) and resuming outwith the previous network (say on the train home). The whole system became sluggish. The way around that was making sure that everything distant was unmounted before suspend. So something else related to your network could cause this. More info seems needed to find out whether it is really mc.

Laptop? What network (manager)??

Rob

cwizardone · 07-15-2016, 09:04 AM

@ elcore,
Thanks for the suggestion. I've give it a spin.

@ brobr,
Thanks for the reply.
The unit is a desktop and is using NetworkManager to connect to the Internet, but
not on a "network" per se.

elcore · 07-23-2016, 11:01 AM

It's possible mc is trying to reach for DNS if certain conditions are met, in my case it only hangs if the interface is up but the gateway is down.
Maybe logging outgoing packets would help identify the cause, so that one can filter them with iptables and eliminate any delays.
Bringing down the interface every time the gateway is down, well that would probably fix it, but I'm fine with the current setup and I don't mind rebuilding the package since I only use it locally.