very slow boot (newbie)

[Daniel Bye]

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 01:12:28AM +0100, Barnaby Scott wrote:
> Thanks for your reply. It didn't occur to me to look at the next line - 
> I thought it must still be doing the Configuring syscons thing!
> 
> Anyway, the next line is:
> 
> Initial i386 initialization:.
> 
> Armed with this knowledge, I just found this post: 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-questions/2004-April/043478.html 
> (although I don't know where the rest of the thread went). However it 
> doesn't leave me much the wiser! The hostname is mentioned earlier in the 
> sequence, so presumably the OS is already aware of that, and as for DNS 
> server, what DNS server?

The fact that the operating system knows what the machine is called,
does not necessarily mean that the name is in the DNS.  You can put an
entry in your /etc/hosts file (take a look at the file for the format),
which will allow sendmail and other daemons to start.  You should also
check that your hostname is in the DNS.  You might find something like
DynDNS or ZoneEdit useful if your machine is on a dynamically assigned
domestic range, such as you'd get from NTL or Telewest.

As for the DNS server, you need to tell FreeBSD where to go to resolve
names to IP addresses.  You do this by putting the IP addresses of your
ISP's name servers in your /etc/resolv.conf (yes, there really is no 'e'
on the end of resolv).  The format is 'nameserver IP.add.re.ss', without
the quotes (man 5 resolv.conf will give you more detail).  You should
also check in /etc/nsswitch.conf to make sure that you have an entry
that looks like this:

hosts: files dns

This tells your local resolver library to consult /etc/hosts before it
goes to the DNS.

If I am teaching Grandma how to suck eggs, I apologise - I got the
impression from the tone of your post, though, that you are quite new 
to all this UNIX stuff!

HTH

Dan

-- 
Daniel Bye

PGP Key: http://www.slightlystrange.org/pgpkey-dan.asc
PGP Key fingerprint: D349 B109 0EB8 2554 4D75  B79A 8B17 F97C 1622 166A
                                                                     _
                                              ASCII ribbon campaign ( )
                                         - against HTML, vCards and  X
                                - proprietary attachments in e-mail / \
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20060512/6e54b03a/attachment.pgp