gdm takes a long time
 

hi all I am running fedora8 on a hp desktop.
It worked fine to start with ... for few days.
Then I configured squid and iptables with NAT entries. I have put that in a script in /etc/sysconfig
/network-scripts directory and executed the script from /etc/init.d/network script.

All of a sudden it slowed down the machine and it now takes a long time for the login manager to give me the desktop, also the desktop icons and panels show up very late ?!?!?!

so how can I trouble shoot the problem and get back a normal bootup and login which
is quick...
thanks in advance
nishith

Remove custom script from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, then restart network service to see if all works fine (or reboot box), then post script here (preferably in BB code tags) for review?

thanks for the suggestion ....
Actually the problem was with the hostname.
Someone had change the servers hostname to bandman in the /etc/hosts file.
I googled around a bit and found out that if the name is not correctly resolved by the host then gdm login takes a long time.
I solved the problem by chaning to a terminal window and using the command
hostname localhost
now my hostname becomes localhost.localdomain and gdm login goes on as expected i.e nicely.
However, the hostname changes back to bandman even though I changed the /etc/hosts file as under:-
127.0.0.1 locahost.localdomain localhost localhost
Can you suggest some solution
thanks
nishith

ok I figured out three ways to change the hostname back to localhost from bandman
first /etc/sysconfig/network file hostname=localhost
second sysctl kernel.hostname=localhost
and lastly
change the /etc/hosts file as in the previous posts.

I check the result by using the hostname --fqdn command and it shows me localhost.localdomain as expected.

Funny thing is still the login is delayed till I changeover to a terminal window with CTRL+ALT+F1 and I do the command
hostname localhost

what is the matter here
nishith

Maybe I'm wrong, but the delay points to it not getting cached (nscd running?).

well I got that sorted out...
I checked out all places for the name of the host
first the sysctl kernel.hostname - it was correct
second the /etc/hosts file - it was correct too
lastly the dns tab in the
network configuration applet - it was misspelt locahost.localdomain ( missing 'l' in
(system-config-network) the word localhost)

I fixed the spelling mistake and bingo! I could log back in a sec.

Thanks anyway for all that support.
nishith

ROTFL! At least you found it yourself. Well done.