During 1994/95 (and earlier) there have been reported problems relating to VUE and the DNS.
Examples;Logging in through vuelogin results in the 3 point xdialog message about checking the hostname in /etc/src.sh, /etc/hosts etc. Accepting the message (which one must do) results in being logged out, whether you have successfully logged in or not.
Performing the recommended checks proves fruitless.
The problem may be intermittent but is correlated to network trouble. It also manifests itself as delayed opening of VUE applications like the file manager and vuepad.
When 'vuelogin' starts the message server ('xmserve') it uses the host's fully qualified domain name, irrespective of the vuelogin directive;
Vuelogin*removeDomainname: True
This means that the full name gets passed for resolution to the name server but with the domain name appended first. This is the normal behaviour with a domain entry in /etc/resolv.conf.
So "machine.site.com" is first looked up as "machine.site.com.site.com". Of course your local nameserver cannot resolve this so it is passed to one that is authoritative for '.com'. If your network is down or the external nameserver cannot be reached then the lookup could take some considerable time. Unfortunately the vuelogin procedure is still running and by the time the lookup succeeds it has already triggered the 3 point message (even though you will probably have successfully logged in).
Note that there are other VUE 'features' that manifest themselves in a similar manner so I'd recommend checking the HP Support site for patches. e.g. PHSS_5481
Most people, including myself, have attempted to tackle the problem by persuading xmserve not to use the full name. All attempts at this to my knowledge have failed. HP have attempted to get round the problem by making the name lookups more robust with fall backs to NIS and/or /etc/hosts.
The only other alternative, which is really obvious, is to change the behaviour of the nslookup search path so that the domain name does not get appended before doing a lookup. Unfortunately this could interfere with other programs which assume it will be appended.
Now /etc/resolv.conf does allow the user to do this with the 'search' directive but is not clear from resolver(4) how to set up a search path that includes '' (Null) (i.e. no appending) other than as the last search by default.
i.e. so that "machine.site.com" gets looked up as "machine.site.com" but "machine" must get looked up as "machine.site.com".
The solution is to use a plain '.' (dot) as the 2nd part of the search path as this will prevent any additional domain information being appended.
# File: /etc/resolv.conf search site.com . com nameserver xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx nameserver yyy.yyy.yyy.yyyThis has the added benefit of reducing DNS lookup traffic outside your own network. If you switch logging on your local 'named' you will see that HP-UX boxes generate an awful lot of through traffic. Anyhow it's a very obvious fix (perhaps others have mentioned it but I haven't seen it on any discussion list or comp.sys.hp.hpux) and doesn't require patching ;-)
The 'nsswitch' feature enables you to configure your machines to use some combination of NIS, /etc/hosts and DNS to resolve names. HP implement this as a series of patches.
Try the following patches or browse the HP Support site.In short, when the network is sick, all sorts of things will stop working. VUE is often the first thing that users notice. It doesn't make sense for VUE to try and work in this environment, since if people are using a name server then they are probably counting on networking for other important things (NFS, rlogin, telnet, ...).
The later versions of HPUX 10.x have the fallback implementation.
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