title: Configure hangs
parent: FAQ
---

# The configure script appears to hang

If you find that the configure script appears to hang on this line:

    checking for redhat spopen problem...

Then you probably have a badly configured DNS server.  This part of configure
is testing for a pthread problem in BIND that is a kernel problem on some Red
Hat derived versions of Linux (around kernel 2.6.9-11).  It runs 10 x 100
nslookup calls to see if your kernel has this problem.  If it does, then at
least one of those calls will fail.  Failure rate could be anywhere between 1%
and 50%.

To force the workaround and ignore the test, run `./configure` with the
`--enable-redhat-pthread-workaround` switch.

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