i'm running into a problem where the following lines in the hibernate-mapping file

<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 2.0//EN" "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hbernate-mapping-3.0.dtd" >

causes xml validation code to connect to hibernate.sourceforge.net.
So, whenever hibernate.sourceforge.net is slugish or I have no internet connection on my machine, connect would fail. Is there a way to use local dtd to validate the xml or turn off the validation altogether?

Make sure your DTD and jar versions match up (3.0 with Hibernate3, etc.) and Hibernate will read it out of its own jar (local). It only goes to the internet if it can't find it in the jar (mismatch of versions).

By the way, this has been addressed many times in this forum.

You might try and fix this line first.
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD 2.0//EN" "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hbernate-mapping-3.0.dtd" >