Starting IRAF takes too looooong

Does it seams that IRAF is getting too much time to start? And if it starts do you see cannot access host 'iraf.noao.edu:80' ?

If yes, then if you also try iraf.noao.edu then you will notice that it does take too much time to open (if…it opens!). So, in this case the server is down and IRAF cannot access it. But why IRAF tries to connect to the website? After all we just need it to run some tasks.

After v2.16 they have included in the login.cl a line which checks for updates. To avoid this the solution is just to comment the line which includes the ‘ckhupdate’ command in the login.cl, e.g.

#============================================================================
# Check for updates to the system
# chkupdate

# Notify the user if we're using the global login.
path (".") | scan (s1)
if ( osfn("home$") != substr (s1, strldx("!",s1)+1, strlen(s1)) ) {
printf (" *** Using global login file: %slogin.cl\n", osfn("home$"))
}
;


Definitely this is not new, but since I have seen this message a couple of times in the past (without looking into any further) and I had performed some installations yesterday, I got a bit worried if something broke. Fortunately not! So, a note of what I changed is a probable useful future tip!