Netscape slow startup (was Re: [plug] PPP on demand)

[Colin Muller]

John Summerfield wrote:

> Well, I note that Netscape takes ages to start when I'm not connected to
> the Internet, bust starts quickly when I am.
> 
> I've done all that I can find in Edit/Preferences - set my home page local
> etc.

I've been playing around with this. It looks like a DNS matter - if
Netscape cannot resolve, say, one of the mail or news servers you have
listed under Preferences, it will choke for ages at startup. On my
system, simply adding names and numbers to /etc/hosts was not enough - I
can't work out why not, hosts is down as first choice in host.conf.
However, using 127.0.0.1 as the nameserver and setting up the correct
forward and reverse name resolution for the local domains/IPs (in my
case 127.0.0.* and 192.168.1.*) completely cures the Netscape startup
problem.

Linuxconf does not seem to do a very good job of the named setup - I
ended up editing the various named forward and reverse resolution files
by hand. You probably know how to do that - but if not, drop me a line
and I'll forward the files as samples.

Colin