Bug 426575

Ok, I've decided to go through all the Python code (though I don't know Pythin,
but its close enough to Perl, C, PHP,...) and I've traced the problem to
/etc/hosts loading. It seems that handling /etc/hosts entries is too time and
memory consuming. The problem occures in NCProfileList.py lines 143 through 151:
for key in hoconf.keys()...

I have a large /etc/hosts, most of it being taken from here:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt
Since this list is huge (around 600kB), hoconf list gets clogged with items and
this loop just goes on forever.

I don't need this large hosts file on this particular machine and have cropped
it to only few entries, but the problem persists on my other machine where I do
need large hosts file.

Workaround: replace /etc/hosts with something short (i.e. the one having only
localhost in it), do whatever you need to do with system-config-network and,
after you're done (and quit s-c-network), replace /etc/hosts with the original file.

Suggestion: it might be wise to move the handling of /etc/hosts to another app
or at least another window (being started from menus or with the click of the
button), since antispam hosts files are not that uncommon.

Hi, this issue has been fixed in the 1.4.7 version of s-c-n. If you want to try 
it you can install it by $ yum update system-config-network --
enablerepo=updates-testing. But thanks to your hosts file i noticed a minor bug 
in this version - there is a problem on line 6423 it contains only hostname but 
no ip, so you have to edit the file manually and add 127.0.0.1 at the begging 
of that line.

Jirka

system-config-network-1.5.5-1.fc8 has been submitted as an update for Fedora 8

system-config-network-1.5.5-1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 testing repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
 If you want to test the update, you can install it with 
 su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update system-config-network'.  You can provide feedback for this update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-2995

Ok, I've installed system-config-network-1.5.5-1.fc8 from F8 testing repository
and have tried it after updating my host file with enteries from
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt .

Upon starting, s-c-n has reported errors in the following lines of the hosts file:
127.0.0.1  norbert_sirot.club.fr #[Trojan-Spy.Win32.Banker.anv]
127.0.0.1  ___id___.c.mystat-in.net #[Wildcard DNS]
127.0.0.1  web--search.com #[McAfee.Adware-SBSoft]
127.0.0.1  www.web--search.com
127.0.0.1  search_fd.php.coolwebsearch.com #[Wildcard DNS]

Now, underscore IS illegal part of domain/server name (at least SeaMonkey
doesn't recognize it), but minus (lines 3 and 4) is not. I see that only a
double-minus is not accepted (i.e. www2.a-counter.kiev.ua is not labeled as an
error), but since browsers accept double-minuses, I think s-c-n should as well
(to allow blacklisting). Actually, I don't see why s-c-n doesn't just ignore
this kind of errors (except when entries are edited through s-c-n itself).

What confused me more is that 127.0.0.1 entries from the hosts file were not
available for editing in s-c-n (didn't notice this before). I'm not sure if it's
considered a bug or a feature, but upon saving, errors persisted and were still
being reported, whith no way to repair them (inside s-c-n) and I do consider
this a problem: why reporting if I'm not given a way to repair it?

Minor note: upon saving, some lines had spaces (or tabs?) added at the end.

Yes, double minuses should be accepted - I'm going to fix this asap. But you 
not right about the 127.0.0.1 entries - there is a checkbox in the left lower 
corner called "show loopback" which toggles showing of this entries.

Jirka

Sorry, I've missed that checkbox (I usually edit hosts file in gvim).

Related to that (although it's not a bug report): since error reports provide
line numbers, you might consider adding "line number" column to the GUI (new
enteries would have this field empty or set to "new" or something). With
something over 18000 lines in hosts file, reports like "error in line xxxxx" are
quite useless if you don't see the line numbers.

Thank you,

V.

system-config-network-1.5.5-1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.