Very Computer

I am using YDL 1.2, kernel 2.2.17-something or other (latest release from
yup).  
I seem to have mangled my configuration so that I cannot use X unless I am
connected
to an ethernet cable.  Symptoms: when booting as a stand-alone machine,
three daemon
processes take a long time to start:

- sendmail (which I need to turn off anyway),
- xfs,and
- linuxconf (which I think I may want to turn off too).

When logged in, I type in startx and simply wait.  Nothing happens until I
press CTRL-C, and
then I am returned to the Linux prompt.  I don't know enough about these
processes to give
a more intelligent problem description, so if further detail is needed, feel
free to tell
me what details are required.

Any help here would be much appreciated.

--
A S Hodel Assoc. Prof. Dept Elec. Comp. Eng.  Auburn Univ, AL 36849-5201
(334) 844-1854 Fax -1809 http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~scotte

Yeah, but xfs is kind of essential. I've seen this problem on my Powerbook
2400: when I'm on batteries I don't even have a NIC, since I unplug the
(power hungry) PCMCIA card.

The basic problem appears to be that these services look up the IP address
of their own host by name. This can be a problem for standalone machines
or even DHCP machines. The solution is to add the host name to /etc/hosts
as an alias for "localhost" (the loopback IP address). Here's the
/etc/hosts for my powerbook ("chisai"):

127.0.0.1               chisai localhost localhost.localdomain

The name you add should be what your "hostname" command returns.

With this setup, services on my powerbook can always get an IP address for
it even if there's no NIC, or if DNS thinks its name is

--
| John Doty             "You can't confuse me, that's my job."