shell's command line locks after commands like ls
 

I believe I have some sort of configuration problems with openssh on my RH9 box, even though I have all the defaults set. Everything that I am about to mentioned used to work, before I messed it up.

I can log in and navigate fine through the filesystem, but when I run commands like ls and ps that have a fairly long list of output, the first line will display to my shell and then it locks to all keyboard input further input/output. I am forced to disconnect and log in again.

I am using an SSH for client workstations. When I use this to log into an old school account, these commands are executed fine.

In addition, when I open the file transfer window, it says its "reading folder...please wait", but nothing happens and again the shell locks up and i have to restart.


:newbie:

thanks for any help!

What client are you using. I usually use putty. Try using that and see if it makes any difference.

Nope, just tried with putty and the same problem arrises. The test that I do is to list the files in a directory that has a large listing. For example, if I 'ls /usr/bin' nothing happens, and I no longer am able to type commands or even kill the [supposed to be] running process.

Are you doing this over a very slow connection?

I'm at work, are you talking about the connection out or in to the server?
I used to be able to send commands with no problems!?

Can you think of anything you may have done about the time it stopped working? Anything at all such as new softwre install etc?

Using putty, with a ssh connection to my box, I opened an ftp session from that shell. I went to two picture folders that I have up, and when I listed the one with fewer pics (~17) it listed fine...the larger (~22), the 'ls' cmd did nothing, and the keyboard locked. This is the same when viewing ftp folders from other mediums such as a web browser.

It is like there is a setting limiting the number of files/directories or even lines (sending a ps -eaf command).

I have tried these same commands when logged onto other unix servers and I had no problems.

Could this be an apache problem?!

I have been trying to get mysql and php to work, just learning. As I am finding out, I am doing it the hard way. Instead of installing the rpm packages, I have been downloading the source and compiling it myself. I don't know if anything that I have been doing has affected it or not.

I can;t see how it would be related to apache.

Try running:
top

and see if there is a process eating your CPU

When running top, I again only recieved a couple lines of output.

15:21:12 up 56 min, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
50 processes: 49 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped

after that the keyboard locked up...crazy isn't it...some cmds go through, the one's that only send small lists to the screen, but you would think that larger outputs would be at least as long as the smaller ones that were able to complete?

well the odd thing there is the load average. You would theink ther ewould be something.

Do you not have diret access to the machine where you could see what was happening?

15:40:00 up 1:14, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
50 processes: 49 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.4% user 0.5% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 98.9% idle
Mem: 190680k av, 141324k used, 49356k free, 0k shrd, 62816k buff
98132k actv, 152k in_d, 612k in_c


here is a bit more output from top, your right, no load ave.

I do not have direct access, I would have to wait till I get home from work in a couple of hours.

when you start the 'top' process, does it usually update the load average after displaying the rest of its output? maybe these are just the initial values that have not been updated?

I have run this cmd on the host machine and it worked fine.

I was able to run top without it locking. Not at all when running as root, somtimes locks with other users

When you run it try pressing "P" or "M" to sort by procesor and Memory usage. See if any of the percentages are high.

Since yuo have just installed apache - have you tried disabling it?

Take a look at the output of "ifconfig" a few times to see it there is a lot of network usage.