Suse diagnostic utils/Logon taking ages
 

hi, i've got an issue with my suse install. i think there may be a fault with the hardware but i dont know any standard diagnostic tools (like windows has scandisk etc...) to diagnose the problem.

The problem that i'm trying to uncover is why my suse is taking so long to log on at command prompt. it pauses for at least 60seconds before i can logon. i get the same issue when trying to ssh into the box. I diddnt do the install neither do i have access to the internals of the pc as the box is locked.

The hardware is a nehemiah board.

Oh, those tools exist on Linux as well. Checking filesystems is done with 'fsck'. I rather doubt that this has got much to do with filesystem problems. Those show up as out-n-out failures and not performance problems. If you can reboot the system, you might be able to run the memory diagnostic 'memtest'. It gets installed in the grub boot menu in the SuSE versions that I'm familiar with. Again, I'm doubting that this is a memory problem unless you don't have much memory in the system (see below).

Locked as ``I can't get the cover off'' or locked as in ``All I have is a garden-variety, non-superuser user account''?

Regardless, running the command
and see if some process is chewing up all the CPU cycles. Waiting 60 seconds for a login to complete is pretty bad. If you can run the above as root, you can kill a runaway process. (But you should know what it is doing on the system before killing it so don't go on a rampage just yet.) Also, if you can, cut-n-paste the top 10 processes that top displays. Include the CPU utilization and the memory/swap information as well. If your system is memory-starved it could be thrashing and that'll kill performance faster than just about anything. Is the hard drive LED blinking? A little? A lot? (Hopefully it's not just "on".) BTW, which version of SuSE?


I don't know much about these but, from what I found, they don't seem to be so underpowered that you'd see these performance problems. (Heck I've got a P100 that doesn't take more than a second or so to log me in.)

Report back and we'll see what we can do about this.