F8 slow to boot and slow to open terminal/gedit

[JonR]

I have installed F8 on a Tosh Tecra M5. The problem I have is that on boot the system hangs starting cups for about 80 seconds. I can then login but the desktop and taskbar do not complete loading for another 5 minutes. Once the system is ready some apps, like FF for instance, start immediately but others like terminal and gedit take almost a minute to appear. Once they are running they work fine. If I start them from a terminal there are no error messages, they terminal just freezes until the app appears and is closed again.

Now here's the odd thing. If I stop the network everything works instantly, no delays. As soon as I restart the network the problem reappears.

I'm now running 2.6.24.3-50 from update-testing as I also had the pnpacpi problem documented elsewhere. That problem is fixed with 3-50 see: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...8&page=2&pp=15 . Using an older kernel makes no difference, I've tried 2.6.24.3-34 and 2.6.23.1-42, both give the same result.

I've been searching the forums for clues to this one but haven't found anything yet. Anyone else seen this behaviour? Any advice would be appreciated.

[LordMorgul]

How is your DNS resolution performing for firefox? Do you have your localhost hostname defined in /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/hosts?

Check that you do NOT have http_proxy or ftp_proxy defined in your shell environment (or HTTP_PROXY and FTP_PROXY). Try echo $http_proxy

[JonR]

Thanks for the help. Here is my hosts file:

[jon@hermes ~]$ cat /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost       hermes
::1     localhost.localdomain   localhost       hermes
[jon@hermes ~]$

I don't have HTTP_PROXY, FTP_PROXY, http_proxy or ftp_proxy set.

Here too is ifconfig:

[root@hermes ~]# ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:15:B7:A4:80:5D  
          inet addr:192.168.1.108  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::215:b7ff:fea4:805d/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:931 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1013 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100 
          RX bytes:387345 (378.2 KiB)  TX bytes:166326 (162.4 KiB)
          Base address:0xcfe0 Memory:ffde0000-ffe00000 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:13066 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:13066 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:5881092 (5.6 MiB)  TX bytes:5881092 (5.6 MiB)

[root@hermes ~]#

I think you may be right to ask about DNS. Whenever I try to load a page in FF there is a few seconds delay "Looking up domain.name" before the page displays. But if I ping a domain the response is instant.

[JonR]

It's not DNS. It's something to do with permissions but to access what I have no idea although I am suspicious of /tmp/.ICS-unix/ even though it is showing:

drwxrwxrwt  2 root root 4096 2008-03-24 17:39 .ICE-unix

When I do an strace on apps slow to start it is sockets in this directory which are being read at the point where the app start-up stalls.

More to the point, if I run the same apps as root they start immediately.

Anyone have any ideas what could be causing the hang when I try to start them from a non-root user?

[JohnVV]

hi also what isp do you use .For me wow( wide open west) dose not like ip6 one bit turning it off in the services dose not fix it . the only fix i have found is turning if off during install , If i don't then boot hangs cups ,smartd , dchp, ... all have to time out 350 sec . It takes about 3 min to load the desktop ...
all this can be " fixed" -- sort of -- by setting the network to "io" and not "eth0" but then there is NO net access and on pulse audio

[JonR]

Thanks JohnVV. I have three other F8 systems on this subnet all of which work fine so I don't think this is an ISP issue.

I am becoming convinced this isn't a network problem at all although it looks like one. All these slow apps work fine when launched as root. That says permissions to me.

If anyone has any insights on this I'd really like to hear them. I've been messing with this for nearly 3 days now...

[JonR]

Cracked it! And I take back my previous comments!

The solution was to edit the loopback line in etc hosts to include both the short system alias and the full name thus:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost hermes hermes.domain.com

Apps now start instantly and the cups hang on boot has gone too.

So, it was networking... apologies to LordMorgul and JohnVV. You were right, it was DNS... sort of! Many thanks for your help.

[JohnVV]

DNS lookup will do it every time
but it was " fun" see
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl...8/03/15/193234
and
http://blog.anamazingmind.com/2008/0...use-linux.html

[JonR]

I'd still like to know why apps started without delay when launched by root... Can anyone explain that?