Slow login to HP-UX box through Telnet

[JL Billman]

I have 9 HP9000 boxes running HP-UX 11.11. When I telnet into them it takes a long time for the login prompt to show up. I have no problwems telnetting out of the box. Telnetting between the 9 boxes shows no delays.
Basically there is a several minutes wait to proceed from telnet's connection to displaying the login prompt.

Here is what I see:

$ telnet 10.40.35.10
Trying...
Connected to 10.40.35.10.
Escape character is '^]'.

The wait time is about one minute to one adn a half minutes.

[Tim Nelson · Accepted solution]

99% of the time this is due to DNS issues.

The server is attempting to reverse lookup your IP address to make an entry in the log. If DNS is not configured correctly the search takes many seconds / minutes. Hence the delay.

Either configure DNS correctly or disable DNS completely.

[JL Billman]

Wow, that was the fastest response ever! I was suspecting DNS. Thanks for confirming my suspicion.

[Tim Nelson]

Check your /etc/resolv.conf
hosts: files [notfound=continue] dns

A great test is to telnet from the server back to itself. The localhost lookup should be instant.

Even for PCs on the lan that typically do not have DNS hostname entries, if DNS is configured correctly in the environment it should at least return an unknown vs trying to send the resolution up the chain forever and ever.

I have typically seen this where the DNS is run by the Windows folks. They do not set up a reverse lookup domain. They need to at least configure it. Even if they do not plan on having reverse lookups. This way the DNS server will immediately return an unknown or notfound.