Re: very slow initial connection, then all is well

For now, anyway, this will be my summary of this issue.

Why? Because the problem has gone away.

As reported below, adding client machines to the hosts file made the
connection speed as fast as normal, but that was just a band aid. I
needed to find what had changed.

This morning I was planning to make some changes to the hosts.allow file
to try to get around the apparent slow reverse dns lookup. However, the
connections are all back to normal speed, even without any entries for
clients in the hosts file.

Of course, this makes no sense. However, since there are computers
involved, it sort of does make sense. I had joked yesterday morning
that if we just waited one day the problem would go away, and it turns
out I was correct. The Windows domain controller that is acting as our
internal dns server has nothing in its logs to indicate there were any
problems. Definitely nothing changed in the configuration of any of the
systems overnight, but yesterday this problem mysteriously appeared, and
today it is mysteriously gone.

Still, I learned a little bit more about the hosts.allow file, and we
had no real negative impact on work from the problem, so I'll call that
a positive, and write it off as "One of those computer things" as
depicted in this PvP cartoon:

http://www.pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=20040530

Bill

Bill Earl wrote:

>
> Well, here's the status, and I will report the final outcome of this,
> when that occurs...
>
> While googling for "slow ssh login" I found some references to adding
> the machine names and IPs to the hosts files. What the heck, it is
> behaving like some kind of reverse dns lookup oddity.
>
> Adding machine names and ip addresses to the hosts file solves the
> problem. Now, that works for today (fortunately we're a pretty small
> shop, only 15 machines to add), but it doesn't answer "What changed?"
>
> Our "other" network machines are served by a Windows domain controller
> server that provides WINS and DNS. The Linux boxes are pointed at
> that machine for their DNS needs. Until this morning, that was
> apparently all they needed. It probably goes without saying that
> there is nothing in the Windows machine's logs to indicate there are
> any problems, nothing was changed on this machine, and even rebooting
> the thing doesn't put things back to the way they were.
>
> So for now everything is back to normal speed, and I'm going to
> lunch. I'll sort out later why our Linux boxes just NOW decided that
> a Windows DNS server isn't good enough for them. ;-)
>
> Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. You all steered me in the
> right direction, and that's what I needed. More when the answer is
> found, or when new info appears.
>
> Bill
>

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