30 second pause after login, before password.

[Jeremy H.]

An interesting one for you folks,

I have an HPUX 11.11 box that has started pausing for roughly 30 seconds after you enter your user name. After 30 seconds the password prompt appears and you can login.

Any ideas on what would cause this behavior?

Thanks in advance,
Jeremy

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Are passwords stored locally or are you running NIS, NIS+, LDAP, ... ?

Is the performance of the machine otherwise normal?

[DCE]

another possible cause is DNS

Any issues with your DNS servers?

How is your nsswitch.conf configured?

[Jeremy H.]

DNS is working properly and all passwords are stored locally. Performance on the box is great as it's not yet in production.

10:27am up 14 days, 12:15, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.01

Jeremy

[A. Clay Stephenson]

One of the things that can cause this symptom is an extremely large or corrupt utmp and/or utmpx file. Trying nulling these files as well as the /var/adm/wtmp files.

[Jeremy H.]

nsswitch.conf is absent on this box. It is also absent on the machine it is replacing and there is no issue on that machine.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Another possible culprit is a confused/stale passwd caching daemon. KIll pwgrd and see if the problems disappear. You actually don't need this daemon as UNIX boxes ran for decades without this guy.

[Jeremy H.]

I've nullified wtmp, utmp and utmpx.
I've also stopped the pwgrd service.

We're still at roughly 30 seconds from the time I enter my username until the password dialog finally shows up.

I also HUP'd the sshd daemon after comparing it's config with the machine that isn't having this problem.


Jeremy

[OldSchool]

ok, ssh is in the mix. check forward and reverse name lookup times from the SERVER to the CLIENT.

I've not looked at ssh to see *why* its a factor, but it will impact login time if there is an issue there

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Okay, we are really shooting in the dark here. It's time to find out what is really going on.

First, install tusc on your box if it isn't already installed. You can get it from here:

http://hpux.its.tudelft.nl/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/tusc-7.8/

Now logon in two sessions and then
"telnet localhost"
Just let that session sit at the "login:" prompt.

Now in your other session"ps -ef | grep login" and identify the PID of the login process. Next do a "tusc -p PID".

Now return to your login session and login normally.

The tusc output will show you what is causing the delay as the tusc output pauses.

[Jov]

Had similar problem years ago on 11.11 and from memory it was due to the hostname was not in /etc/hosts for the 1st NIC.

The symptom was the same and due to name resolution time-out. Check to ensure all the names are consistent, by running â hostnameâ , â uname â aâ , nslookup, etc..

Do you have ssh installed, does it have the same issue?


Jov

[Jov]

>> running â  hostnameâ  , â  uname â  aâ  , nslookup, etc..

Its meant to be:
running 'hostname', 'uname -a', 'nslookup', etc..


Jov

[Jov]

Ignore my last two post as I thought it was a telnet related issue (thats what you get for scanning a thread ;)

tail -f your syslog when next ssh in the affected server.


Jov

[Jeremy H.]

I was wrong!!!

Not the first time, and certainly won't be the last.

Reverse DNS lookups were failing and once I fixed that, viola!

Thanks to all for your time and effort, it is much appreciated.

Sincerely,
Jeremy

[Jov]

Common mistake, as you'd thought you elminated DNS issue by testing forward lookup only.


Jov