Hi Gang,

We seem to be having a problem while trying to talk to our server.
Specifically, whenever we try to login remotely via SSH, the login
prompt pops right up, as well as the password prompt; however,
after we enter our passwords, there is a long delay before we
get a bash-shell prompt. The delay is about 10 seconds, and
it seems to be about the same time length every time.


We're also having the exact same delay problems while trying
to publish web pages via FTP to our server, and the delay
seems to be about the same length as the SSH-prompt delay
mentioned above. It is also important to note that this
situation is happening from numerous clients; it's not just
a single machine having a "bad hair day" or something. :^)


Off the top of my head, this looks like a TCP/IP issue.
OTOH, I've looked at eth0, iptables, etc., and everything
seems fine. Even ran chkrootkit to no avail. (Thank God! :^))
Personally, I think the machine just might have a rootkit
or an iptables problem, but I haven't noticed any edits to
anything in /var/log/* .


I've also looked at running daemons/processes (via services) and
have found nothing unusual. As a matter of fact, about the
only thing I haven't done is disassemble known rooted
executables, such as ls, ps, who, finger, and the like.


Basically, I'm stumped, and I'd really, really appreciate
it if you kind folks could lend me a hand in solving this
mystery. Any known issues with the TCP/IP stack?


Personally, I'd would be thinking that the box has been
rooted by somebody with some new-fangled zero-day flaw,
because of one main reason: the box was running fine,
and all of a sudden and out of the blue, things started
slowing down for no apparent reason. OTOH, our data files
have been backed up and the machine formatted, and the same
flaw showed up immediately after installation.

To me, this screams hardware issue, but everything other
than SSH and FTP works flawlessly. So, with that in mind,
I've written the above diatribe/tome, hoping some Fedora
guru will pop his/her head up with a solution :^).

TIA!

Randall Jouett, AB5NI

For what it's worth,
I have experienced the same behaviour with ssh, both command line, from let's say another linux or Cygwin, and putty. There's a long delay. Even when I have preinstalled authorized_keys. And it has ALWAYS occured when I try to connect to RedHat, Suse, Centos or Fedora machines. And several generations of 'em, dating back to RH7 even. Never to Slack, Deb or win (as an ssh service under cygwin). You seem to know Your way around, maybe there's something in common for some distros? Packaging? Versions? Flavours? I have always chalked it down as "Oh, it's negotiating keys, there *may* be some incompatibilty or so" but it works and once the connection is up there's no problem and I never bothered to pin down the reason.

Just to let You know that You're not alone! And to get the rootkit idea out of Your head, our machines are on a pretty secure local net so I would rule that out.

/Lakris