dhcpcd stalling new application startup
 

Hello! My name is Patrick Clay and I am running Gentoo Linux on my Dell 8600 laptop.

The problem I am having is as follows:

when dhcpcd is running, any application that I attemp to start will wait 20-30 seconds before starting up.

I am pretty sure it is dhcpcd causing the problem because if i execute "killall dhcpcd" all the programs that were waiting to start immediately start up.

How can I fix this? Am I connecting to the Internet the improper way?

The way I connect to the Internet is configuring my wireless card (using ipw2200 for driver, btw) with iwconfig, using ifconfig to get eth1 up, then using 'dhcpcd eth1' to get an ip address.

Thanks for any suggestions in getting this issue resolved.

That's odd, since I do nearly the same thing with my Gentoo laptop (though it is an ndiswrapper driver). What kind of applications do you get these issues with? What if you execute apps from the command line?

Thanks for the quick reply!

If a run gnome-terminal the busy cursor will show for about 20 seconds then disappear.

If I already have a terminal open and i run a command (such as gaim) nothing will happen for about 20 seconds then the program will start up as normal and function properly. The same applies to ethereal, gedit, nautilus, etc.

The way I 'fix' it is to use Ctrl+Alt+F1, log in as root, kill dhcpcd, switch back and everything is back to normal.

What about non-GUI apps? If you already have a terminal open and run, say, nano, how is the startup time there? I have a weird hunch this may be something DNS related, but I would think that would be anytime you are connected, not just with dhcpcd actively running.

non-GUI apps work great in an already running terminal

For example, I use the commands joe and emerge and they work fine.

very odd. Do you get any messages in the terminal if you try to launch a GUI app from there?

I don't receive any messages. It is just a long pause before everything starts up as normal.

I think I found a solution...

the command I use to bring up my wireless interface is:

dhcpcd eth1

since for whatever reason my sytem isn't liking dhcpcd i add the option -p to dhcpcd, bring up my wireless interface, then kill dhcpcd.
the -p option allows dhcpcd to be terminated yet it doesn't bring down the interface with it. So now my wireless start-up script looks like this:

dhcpcd -p eth1
killall dhcpcd

So basically the dhcp daemon gets an ipaddress then gets out of the way. So far it's working great!

Thanks for the insight everyone! (Special thanks to McClain!)

I can see this causing a problem when a dhcp server requires a renew but right now that is less of a hassle to deal with than having to kill and restart dhcpcd everytime i want to start a new application.

The lesser of two evils, folks! :-)

I'm glad it's working for you now. If you ever figure out the root cause of the problem, let us know. (Why your system doesn't like dhcpcd)