The Things I Find

More Fedora hilarity, this time caused by me naming my machine something meaningful via the hostname command.

I couldn’t tell what was causing it, but applications - even simple ones like the image viewer - were taking 1-2 minutes to load. A little network sniffing showed me that my Linux box was sending IPV6 DNS requests (for AAAA records) to my ADSL router over IPV4; my ADSL router was either ignoring or rejecting them, depending on its mood.

The fix is to add the new hostname to /etc/hosts, on the line where it defines localhost:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost [machine name]

With a bit of luck, that’ll fix it.