Hi,

Running 7.1 and I'm getting very slow logins to ssh, procmail and ftp. However, once I'm logged in, the connection on all three services is very fast.

Any suggestions on what can be adjusted to help with login speed of username password.

Thanks.

Without more info about the system, I'm going to assume (ugg).
My first guess w/ be to check your dns mechanism. Those services will try to reverse lookup your IP for security reasons. If it can't resolve it, it'll still let you in. But, you wait while your server eventually times out.

Try this. Enter the IP + host name of one of the clients into the /etc/hosts file of the ssh/ftp/mail server. Then, try to connect to one of those services using that same client.. if it works you should see a big difference in time it takes to login to your server.

I forgot to mention that I am connecting to the Linux server from a Windows machine. Does the DNS still apply?

Thanks

Yup -- the Linux box doesn't really know that. It just sees a telnet client, or an ftp client. And, this is how you want it. You want the security measures to be applied to all platforms -- you don't want to assume that one is safer than the other.

Jon

I have checked all my DNS files:
/etc/named.d
/etc/<ip reversed>.rev

...and all seems well.

What do you mean by:

"Enter the IP + host name of one of the clients into the /etc/hosts file of the ssh/ftp/mail server.

...can you be more specific?

Order do you have any other suggestions.

Thanks

Before you get too involved in DNS server configuration, let's just use the hosts file and I'll give you a pretty basic example.

You have 2 machines, we'll call client and server. Let's just say client is 192.168.1.1 and server is 192.168.1.2. You do NOTHING on the client. On the server, you edit the /etc/hosts file. Inside, you'll add:

192.168.1.1 client.domainname.com client
192.168.1.2 server.domainname.com server

Leave the other stuff alone. If you haven't changed anything in your /etc/nsswitch.conf file on your server then this should fix the problem.

That is it. No reboot/restart. Just try to login.

Just in case anyone is still having this problem... If you're running Ubuntu Hoary, then you probably will be.

you can add this line to the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config :

UseDNS no

This is especially helpful if you happen to be using DHCP to configure your hosts.

The only problem is, it might be a security risk if your ssh server is exposed to the internet. The risks are, as always, yours to weigh.

-Brandon