Slow boot and terminal start on Linux boxes

Now this was a mystery. I had two Linux boxes which booted perfectly when used inhouse, but very slowly indeed (10 minutes plus) when in use on a customer site. Very awkward really - we would test out the systems in Melksham and find them fine, but then they would fail in Bristol. Even calling up a terminal window took minutes!

A clue ... with pauses at networking, sendmail and sm-client ... the problem had to be DNS (domain name service) related, but I checked all the systems - good and bad - and found the same name servers in /etc/resolv.conf and the same host line in /etc/nsswitch.conf, namely
hosts files dns

It turns out that the problem is in /etc/hosts. My machines have names like holt.wellho.net, trowbridge.wellho.net, iford.wellho.net and easterton.wellho.net and if the /etc/hosts file contained both the short (trowbridge) and long (trowbridge.wellho.net) names against 127.0.0.1, it worked fine - but if the fully qualified name was missing it was going to DNS and failing to find it away from the office.

Isn't it gauling how - once you have spend what seems like an eternity trackinging something like this down - the final answer is so darned obvious!
(written 2008-06-05)

Associated topics are indexed under

A163 - Web Application Deployment - Network Configuration and Security
  [3448] Checking all the systems on a subnet, using Expect and Tk - (2011-09-18)
  [2489] Parallel Pinging, using Python Threads or Expect spawn lists - (2009-11-02)
  [2052] How was my web site compromised? - (2009-02-24)
  [1904] Ruby, Perl, Linux, MySQL - some training notes - (2008-11-23)
  [1712] As different as night and tyres - (2008-07-18)
  [1408] Wireless hotel tips - FTP and Skype connections failing - (2007-10-26)
  [1073] Heartbeat script in Perl - (2007-02-09)
  [511] Domain Forwarding - 2 ways of doing it - (2005-11-29)
  [506] What are DHCP and DNS? - (2005-11-27)
  [332] Looking up IP addresses - (2005-06-01)
  [267] Searching security holes - (2005-04-04)
  [37] Security and Safety - (2004-09-03)
  [11] A bolt of lightning on Multicasting - (2004-08-11)

A171 - Web Application Deployment - Linux Server Admin - Exercise
  [2491] Root is root for a reason! - (2009-11-03)
  [1719] A special day - last Friday in July - (2008-07-25)

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