I'm trying to set up a server that can, among other things, run an FTP server for clients on my LAN. (I'm not too worried about security right yet.)

I have a spare Dell 500 MHz Pentium II with 98M RAM and plenty of hard disk that can be dedicated to this purpose. I installed Red Hat 7.0 in server configuration, no X Window, no GUI. I added the wu-ftpd RPM. The whole machine is partitioned for Linux (no dual-boot). Seemed to go pretty smoothly.

When I try to log in from an FTP client on another node on my LAN, there's a delay of over 60 sec before login is complete. My client shows "connecting to 192.168.1.1" almost instantly, but over a minute goes by before I see the wu-ftpd welcome message and a username query.

Once that happens, the rest of the process (username, password, etc.) goes very fast. Everything appears normal, including file transfers which happen at quite respectable speeds.

I tried two different ftp clients (ws_ftp and the ftp client built into the Cygwin shell). Also, I repeated the install several times, including a couple of times with Red Hat 7.2. Same results.

Other Linux applications run just fine. The only problem is that delay on ftp login. (Well, actually, telnet logins are also pretty slow, maybe 15 to 20 sec.)

I noted that both Linux installs use xinetd as opposed to plain old inetd. Maybe there's some sort of security glitch that's slowing things down.

Any ideas?

Even I have similar problem. I was reading about that and I could find that ftp first tries to authenticate using differant methods other than passwd. After all of that fails it goes back to the passwd authentication.
Here is what I find.

Connected to athreya.ee.iitm.ernet.in.
220 athreya.ee.iitm.ernet.in FTP server (Version wu-2.6.2-5) ready.
504 AUTH GSSAPI not supported.
504 AUTH KERBEROS_V4 not supported.
KERBEROS_V4 rejected as an authentication type
Name (athreya:miniDECT):

So I nowadays try ftp -u ipnum. This seems to be OK. Once connected I use "user login" to authenticate. If I happen to find more about this, I will post again.
--Sarin

When I try to log in from an FTP client on another node on my LAN, there's a delay of over 60 sec before login is complete. My client shows "connecting to 192.168.1.1" almost instantly, but over a minute goes by before I see the wu-ftpd welcome message and a username query.

This is due to the ftp server attempting to do a reverse lookup on your IP address as it looks like your computer's IP address is 192.168.1.X and the server is 192.168.1.1. This can be solved by either a) making your ip address resolvable - a simple way of doing this is by putting an entry in the server's hosts file e.g.

192.168.1.X myotherpc

b) set the ftp server to *not* resolve hostnames (though this might not be possible with some ftpds)

c) running a nameserver on the server will also work, as then it will reply pretty quickly that 192.168.1.x is not resolvable and the ftpd can get to work

naz