Re: gonme and the internet.

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 08:26:56PM -0600 or thereabouts, Michael Thomas Vanderford wrote:
> Hello All.
> I've been trying unsuccesfully to disable my broadband internet
> connection @ boot time and start the network after logged into gnome.
> 
> Doing this makes gnome unresponsive. It seems that most applications
> quit responding.
> 
> Can someone please help?
> Is this just impossible to do.

Is this what you are seeing?

Login.
Drop networking.
Start GNOME.
V-e-r-y  l-o-n-g  wait before Gnome starts.
Then for any application, it takes about 30s to start up,
including things like gnome-terminals?

This is because of the N in GNOME :) Networking. Gnome wants
to know where it is, so to speak. When it starts, one of the
things it does is send a "what am I running on?" message. 

Specifically, I believe. at some stage it will look for the 
nameserver. This is where I get a bit hazy, but I think it is
what is going on. 

If the nameserver's on the box, I presume it's okay.

But mine isn't. If I start GNOME up and the connection to the
nameserver is down, then GNOME keeps looking for the nameserver
for about 30s or a minute and then gives up, and then continues
with the starting up process.

Every application I launch then also looks for the nameserver,
times out, and then starts up anyway.

I have particularly noticed this with my laptop, when I was
using a PCMICA ethernet card:

With no card in, GNOME was fine, started up fine.
With the card in and networking off the box working, GNOME started up fine.

With the card in but not connected at the other end or something like
that, I ran into exactly this problem. It was as if GNOME knew what
to do if there was a working connection and what to do if there was
no connection at all. But if it thought there was one and it turned
out not to work, it sulked :) 

I actually haven't seen this since GNOME 1.x, because I have a
different (working) network set-up now. But I think that if you
are getting long long delays on start-up of any application and
of GNOME itself, it's because it's sitting there waiting for
responses from nameservers which it can't reach.

Having said all that, I may be quite quite wrong. Don't trust
me unless you have some sort of evidence that this is indeed
what's going on. tcpdump on another virtual console watching
for such traffic might show it up, I suppose.

Telsa