Long pause using Berkeley networking

[William Roberts]

In article <16077 at onfcanim.UUCP> dave at onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale) writes:
>Does anybody know what is going on here?  Is the Mac looking for a
>Yellow Pages server to look up the remote host name, even though there
>is no "+" line in /etc/hosts?

We are all suffering from the blessed name daemon. The
gethostent(3N) routines are trying to locate a nameserver by
broadcasting on the network to do host lookup. This is what our
monitoring system shows:

  (ethal) trace 10 occurrences of mymc2
  packet filter-name time  etdst               ipsrc usport udport
  0000   mymc2       0000  0x02.07.01.00.34.da aux0  1023   2049
  0001   mymc2       0220  0x02.07.01.00.34.da aux0  1023   2049
  0002   mymc2       0380  0x02.07.01.00.34.da aux0  1023   2049
  0003   mymc2       0600  0xff.ff.ff.ff.ff.ff aux0  1086   domain
  0004   mymc2       37780 0x02.07.01.00.34.da aux0  1023   2049
  0005   mymc2       37900 0x02.07.01.00.34.da aux0  1023   2049
  0006   mymc2       37980 0x02.07.01.00.34.da aux0  1023   2049
  0007   mymc2       38180 0xff.ff.ff.ff.ff.ff aux0  1089   domain
  0008   mymc2       52940 0x02.07.01.00.34.da aux0  1023   2049
  0009   mymc2       53260 0xff.ff.ff.ff.ff.ff aux0  1092   domain

Ok Apple - how do I turn this off? I too would like to mount
NFS filesystems without hanging.

>Does anyone else run TCP and NFS without YP?

Yes, we do. The only people who get NFS are our undergraduate
students and that's only because there machines will die if the
NFS servers go down: a little YP poison can't makes things much
worse. Otherwise I avoid it like the plague because its retry
strategy is so awful: I don't believe that it should try
forever to find a server.

-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam at cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam at qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250