Subject: Pine slow loading when internet down

From: Joshua Hosseinoff <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 1995 01:50:51 -0400

Last weekend our T1 line was out due to a power outage or some other 
malfunction and so we were cut off from the outside internet.  During 
that time Pine would take nearly two minutes to load up.  I tried 
checking with the debug options on pine to see what it was doing, and as 
far as I can tell it was either trying to ping the localhost or connect 
to the smtp server on the localhost (I should note that during the 
problem that if we tried telnetting or pinging ourselves it would connect 
but only after a long wait).  So does anyone know why pine needs to make 
a tcpip connection during startup?
Thanks

Josh Hosseinoff
[email-masked]

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 16:36:06 -0700 (PDT)

> a tcpip connection during startup?

Is it possible that Pine was waiting for DNS nameserver timeouts?

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 May 1995 11:45:15 -0400

On Sat, 27 May 1995, Joshua Hosseinoff wrote:

> On 26 May 1995, David L Miller wrote:
> 
> Quite likely in fact, but why should Pine need to contact the nameserver 
> in order to start up.   [...]

    I have encountered a similar problem with Pine 3.91 on a Unix 
system.  Although I know what's going on, it is irritating nonetheless.  
I usually start Pine with the -l parameter so that my folder collections 
for mail and news are already setup.  (My personal style is that I often 
flip back and forth between them.)

    Now, the news server on the system I use often seems to be a bit 
flaky, going up and down several times a session when things are bad.  If 
it goes down behind the curtains (i.e., unknown to me) and I try to flip 
folder collections, Pine seems as if it is hung, when in fact it is 
futilely trying to bang on the news server's door, but the news server 
is unconscious.  This brings everything to a screeching halt until 
something or other finally times out and Pine finally gives up with an 
error message and at least lets me use the local folder collection.

    I don't know whether the timeout interval can be set, but it is 
exasperatingly long.  Sometimes the screen blanker on my PC has even 
kicked in.

Paul
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Paul O. Bartlett         <[email-masked]>
P. O. Box 857     Vienna, VA 22183-0857     U.S.A.
Finger, keyserver, or email for PGP 2.6 public key
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From: Joshua Hosseinoff <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 May 1995 22:52:43 -0400

Quite likely in fact, but why should Pine need to contact the nameserver 
in order to start up.  All it should have to do is read in pine-conf 
files and a user's Inbox.  If the reason why Pine needs to contact the 
nameserver is to determine our hostname and domain name, is there a way 
that I can hardcode our hostname so that in future outages and when there 
are lags at our nameserver Pine will start up immediately?
Thanks

Josh Hosseinoff
[email-masked]