Comment 15 for bug 58171

I've noticed very similar behaviour. It is instructive to strace -r -p $pid your running x-session-manager that is on the other end of the socket. In my case it shows it reading resolv.conf and asking my ADSL router (as DNS server) about my machine name. This times out after 5 seconds. tcpdump shows at least two AAAA requests for the name coming back NXDomain.

My nsswitch.conf has:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

My /etc/resolv.conf is (modulo blank lines):

# generated by NetworkManager, do not edit!
nameserver 192.168.150.1

The Right Thing may just be to add an alias in /etc/hosts so that the machine name resolves to 127.0.0.1 (it has the advantage of eliminating the delays), but I doubt it. My Debian machine does not suffer this issue (but then, I don't use Gnome there).

So just what is gnome-session doing gethostbyname if it does not apparently use the result (strace shows no new socket being opened after the lookup)?

Giuliano.