Greetings fellow Slackers!

I am stuck on dial-up. Boo hoo.

To help improve my connection performance, I use a hosts file that contains the IP addresses of all of my browser bookmarks, but also contains a huge list of domain names that I do not want my box connecting to, such as ad servers and p0rn sites (with all addresses pointing to 127.0.0.1 of course). The system is simplistic but works like a charm for me. I've been doing this in Windows for years and I migrated my hosts file to my Slack box.

While online the large hosts file creates no performance problems whatsoever in Slack-KDE. One significant irritation, however, is when I use the KDE KPrinter (my dial-up connection status is irrelevant). KPrinter is configured to use CUPS and CUPS insists upon querying the entire hosts file. This file is huge because of all the 127.0.0.1 redirects. KPrinter pauses for about 55 seconds waiting for CUPS to finish reading the hosts file. I otherwise have no issues with printing but this delay is a toe tapper.

Browsing is disabled in cups.conf.

Is there a way to stop CUPS from reading this large hosts file? This is a locally connected parallel port printer on a stand-alone box. There is no network.

FWIW, I realize there are other solutions to reduce the size of my hosts file. One day I'll look into those ideas. Right now I'd like to know how to get CUPS to stop reading the hosts file.

Thoughts and ideas are appreciated!

TIA

Check if you've HostNameLookups On in your cupsd.conf file.
Another one to try would be adding Deny from All and Allow from 127.0.0.1.

Oh well, those options are already set as you recommended. Sometime in the next few weeks I hope to install Squid. Then I'll configure an ACL deny list and transfer the bulk of my hosts file to that ACL. Squid then can deny access to those web sites the same as I currently do with the hosts file. I've already satisfactorily tested the shorter hosts file with KPrinter and CUPS and the KPrinter dialog box once again is responsive.

Regardless, I'd like to know why CUPS browses the hosts file when configured specifically not to do that.