Re: Gnome's dependence on networking...

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 19:18 -0700, Jon Drews wrote:
> Hi Ken:
> It's not RedHat. I get similar things in OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Certain
> GTK apps open very slowly. Here is what I observed with Xfce:
> I do a netstat -n -f inet and get:
> Active Internet connections
> Proto Recv-Q Send-Q  Local Address          Foreign Address        (state)
> udp4       0      0  12.73.168.202.53478    12.102.240.2.53
> I then did a sockstat -4 and I see this:
> $ sockstat -4
> USER     COMMAND    PID   FD PROTO  LOCAL ADDRESS         FOREIGN ADDRESS
> xfce     xfce4-sess 1011  15 udp4   12.73.173.233:62336   12.102.240.2:53
> root     syslogd    273   6  udp4   *:514                 *:*
> So it looks like xfce4-session is trying to find a domain name server?
> /etc/services shows that port 53 is for name servers (I am presuming
> the foreign host has the same convention)

Yep.  Remember, GNOME stands for the GNU _Network_ Object Modeling
Environment.  There are several things that GNOME does that KDE does not
-- which is better, I won't debate, but GNOME definitely requires name
resolution (even if just local).

In GNOME's defense, it's pretty nice to be able to safely between use
the same home directory from multiple systems mounted over NFS.  It also
has various object interface capabilities, many of which are never fully
realized on most installations.

> Xfce uses GTK and Gnome components. My difficulty is that I don't have
> static IP addresses. My ISP, AT&T, also rewrites my resolv.conf with
> each new dial out. I have a different domain name server each time I
> dial out and connect. There must be like 12 of them. The same thing
> applies for WiFi. Depending on what coffee shop I go to, I get a
> different DNS and lease each time.

This is why Fedora-based systems always set a "localhost.localdomain"
default with an entry in /etc/hosts.  Fedora-based systems also come
with a default BIND configuration for a caching-only DNS server
(although it still must be explicitly enabled).

> I may try Bryan Smith's suggestion of using something similar to
> nscd. There is no nscd in OpenBSD.

Hmmm, it should be available.  Anyone who runs NIS or LDAP should be
running it on clients.  Or at least run a caching-only DNS server.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                  b.j.smith@ieee.org 
---------------------------------------------------------------- 
Community software is all about choice, choice of technology.
Unfortunately, too many Linux advocates port over the so-called
"choice" from the commercial software world, brand name marketing.
The result is false assumptions, failure to focus on the real
technical similarities, but loyalty to blind vendor alignments.



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