Hi, I'm a newbie who's been experimenting with Mandrake 9.2 for the past few days. I notice that my box sends a DNS query to my ISP's server that's listed in my resolv.conf file (the one labeled as "search") every time I start up an application. And I'm talking about ANY application, not just the ones that need Internet access. It sends a DNS query even when starting up calc. I know this because the corresponding LED on my switch blinks everytime I try to start an app, and I can see the query from my router's log. Is that normal? Doesn't that just make my box start applications slower? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from doing so? What happens if I comment out the "search" line? Thanks in advance!

Evan

I assume these are all X apps right ? this is going to happen as x is a network protocol. The search line is to define a domain to to append to host names when looking something up, i.e.
if your domin was your.domain.com and you had a host foo and a search line in resolve.conf
search your.domain.com you could type ssh foo and get to foo.your.domain.com. as for the time it takes for the query to time out it is not that long and you are using a sniffer that my be looking at all interfaces and you could be seeing 127.0.0.1 taffic (loop back lo).

Yes, they're all X apps. But I'm still confused about what actually happens when I start an X app. Is the network activity that I see when an app is started just the result of a sniffer that's probing all the interfaces? So my box is not actually sending a DNS query to my ISP's server everytime I start an X app?

What would happen if my ISP server went down? I noticed this whole lookup thing when my girlfriend restarted the router while I was loading up an app. My box showed the hourglass for like 13 seconds until finally the app showed up. So I guess if the router goes down my box crawls?

Oh btw, I unplugged my cable modem while leaving my router on just to see what effect this would have on my box and sure enough, it took like 15 seconds to open an X app. This is so inefficient don't you think? I guess if I lose my connection to the Internet my box becomes useless (or just frustratingly slow)?