On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Michael A. Peters mpeters@mac.com wrote:
I lost my internet connection earlier today.
During that period, my CentOS 5.1 install was extremely slow (2.6 GHz Athlon w/ 2GB ram) at starting non network applications - such as solitare and gnome terminal. It would pause for several seconds before finally starting them.
There's a couple of threads about this from May 2007 or thereabouts that you should be able to find in the list archives. (I know because I started those threads.) The short answer seems to be that Xorg gets annoyed if it can't resolve the local IP address to a hostname, and it attempts to do this any time any application connects to the X server. Other (non-X) apps will cause similar issues if they attempt DNS operations for any reason while the network is down.
You can fix *most* of this by making sure that there are entries in /etc/hosts for 127.0.0.1, etc., but I was never able to get the problem to entirely go away in all circumstances.