slow netscape startup

[kevin at mandrakesoft.com (Kevin Lawton)]

Ron Peterson wrote:
> 
> When my laptop is disconnected from the network, Netscape is extremely
> slow to load the default homepage.  It starts o.k., and eventually
> (several minutes later) loads the homepage.  I've tried making my
> homepage a local file://blahblah and using web page served up by Apache
> running locally.  I've tried turning named on and off.  I have my
> virtual hostname listed in /etc/hosts, and host.conf reads hosts,bind.
> resolv.conf list three nameservers: this laptop, the caching nameserver
> on my office lan, and my isp's.  Is Netscape tring to resolve root
> nameservers or something?


I went down this road before too.  Here's the scoop.

Netscape insists on resolving the IP address of the news
server.  There is no way to delete all the news servers
from the preferences.  You have to have a default for some
reason, even if you don't use it.

Go to preferences, news servers, add one pointing it
to 'localhost' (your machine), and push the 'make default'
button or whatever it is to make that server the default.
You can now delete the bogus default one that netscape
put there for you (if you don't use news from netscape).

Now your machine can resolve localhost via /etc/hosts
rather than an DNS resolve packet going out the network
port to your DNS server.

And Netscape will fire right up.


-Kevin
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