Simon, The looking up of the hostname is not as strange as you might think.
Let's say you're wanting to run a program on a remote box and pipe the window over the network to the computer you're working on. If everything is set up correctly you can do something like the following: [EMAIL PROTECTED] xhost +tom-servo tom-servo being added to access control list [EMAIL PROTECTED] telnet tom-servo Welcome to tom-servo (Linux 2.6.18) login: rob password: ********** [EMAIL PROTECTED] export DISPLAY=crow:0 [EMAIL PROTECTED] gnome-terminal Instead of the gnome-terminal being displayed on the box known as tom-servo, it is displayed on the box known as crow. Every X program is a client that needs a server to talk to. In this case "crow". So in order to resolve "crow" the clients (gnome-terminal and the like) have to do a gethostbyname(). This is a common practice in a server environment when you might have a headless server but there's some X-based tool to configure something local to the server. Also, colleges used to have a beefy server in the back room feeding all the little X clients in the classrooms. --R On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 13:38 -0400, Simon Ruiz wrote: > Thanks to the various communities I am a part of, I've been taught better > than that little Speed Tweak I posted earlier. > > Apparently it's bad practice and can break stuff and, in my case at least, > the performance gain was due to the fact that I formed my /etc/nsswitch.conf > files incorrectly out of ignorance, having it check for hostnames via wins > before looking at the hosts file. It seems that by assigning it to 127.0.0.1, > it began resolving it from memory. > > I had no idea when I made that change that the computer would be checking for > it's OWN hostname everytime it went to run a program. Seems like a strange > practice... > > So, by correctly forming my /etc/nsswitch.conf with files at the beginning, > I'm still experiencing a noticeable speed boost, but this wouldn't help > anyone who didn't bugger up their /etc/nsswitch.conf file in the first place. > > I'm sorry for advocating a bad practice. I was simply excited that it seemed > to work for me. > > Take care! > > Simón > > > _______________________________________________ > Fwlug mailing list > [email protected] > http://fortwaynelug.org/mailman/listinfo/fwlug_fortwaynelug.org > _______________________________________________ Fwlug mailing list [email protected] http://fortwaynelug.org/mailman/listinfo/fwlug_fortwaynelug.org
