iraf.net

On March 1, NOAO disabled access to the iraf.noao.edu website from outside of the firewall (see http://ast.noao.edu/data/software). As a side-effect, the CHKUPDATE command in the login.cl file that uses the website to check for package updates no longer works and CL startup times may appear to hang until the request times out.

To fix this:

1) Edit all of your login.cl file to remove the 'chkupdate' command
2) Edit the hlib$login.cl template file to remove the 'chkupdate' command

Note that wth the default v2.16 installation you no longer are required to do a MKIRAF to create a local login.cl file, a global default file will be created in $HOME/.iraf/login.cl -- this file should also be edited.