Why does Xfce 4.2 have to query a DNS ?

[Craig Boston]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 12:12:22PM -0700, Jon Drews wrote:
>   My question is why should a desktop have to check for a dns ? I may
> have misidentified the problem. However I am curious as to why it
> takes almost 2 minutes for the Xterm to open., when I am dialed out on
> a modem.

I don't know why xfce does this, but it's not the first time I've seen a
similar problem.  ISTR an old GNOME pager applet that would send out
lots of DNS queries when mousing over it...

As a workaround, you may want to consider adding an entry to your
/etc/hosts file for the local machine.  If your IP changes often (as it
probably would on a modem connection), just put an entry for 127.0.0.1
with your hostname.  That should prevent xfce or anything else from
trying to contact an external DNS server when resolving the local
hostname.

I've only run into one piece of software that has problems with doing
that -- Kerberos 5 seems to have trouble getting tickets for rlogin when
the hostname doesn't resolve to its real (network) IP.  Haven't had a
problem with anything else.

HTH,
Craig