[PlanetCCRMA] slowing down?

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> I'm experienceing a curious slowing down occasionally. I think it happenes 
> when I have problems with the ethernet connection (ADSL at home; not very 
> reliable) but I'm not entirely sure. My machine slows down to an 
> unworkable crawl - it sometimes take is over 15 min. to boot, I have to 
> wait 1-2 minutes to launch a terminal etc. 
> Any ideas how to track the problem? 

Most probably you are having problems with DNS (Domain Name Service -
the services your isp should provide that translate between computer
names and ip numbers). 

The timeout for the DNS server is around a minute (I think), if you have
the recommended three servers then a single query could take 3 minutes
to timeout.... See what you get in /etc/resolv.conf after you are done
booting, if you are using dhcp then probably you will find there the ip
numbers of the DNS servers your isp uses. You could use nslookup to do a
lookup manually to see if that is the problem. 

-- Fernando