HP-UX 10.2 delays with Login prompt

[Loux Terry]

The general user population connects to our HP9000 using Reflections and
Telnet. At connection there is usually a delay of 20 to 50 seconds(reported to
be as long a 5 minutes?).

Once logged in performance seems normal. Performance monitors show no obvious
problems. The CPU is generally 95% idle and there are no other signs of heavy
loading or bottlenecks.

The problem 'seemed' to coincide with installation of Multinet on a DEC system
which is used for routing print jobs, which caused some confusion with ports
and queues.

Aside from hiring/training a new system administrator, are there any quick
fixes available?

[John Hancock]

This can be quite a tricky problem.

We have had problems of this type when we have invisible interfaces in the DNS
with round robin enabled or with the default interface being invisible.

The connecting host receives a reply from the DNS of an ip address which is
valid but invisible to the connecting host. It may take some time to time out
this connection request and roll over to the next ip address sent from the DNS
wich (one would hope) be visible tt the connecting host.

John Hancock

[Mark Ling_1]

This usualy is caused by DNS lookup, or by the default router (If the DNS
servers are in diffrent network, usualy it is the case). If you don't use DNS
service, commenting out the DNS IPs in /etc/resolv.conf would solve the
problem. The slow router performence would also slow the DNS lookup, therefore
slow the login process.

[Peter Mchale]

Hello,

Another possible cause of a slow login can be with the file /etc/utmp or
utmpx. If these files have lots of entries in it then you can cat the file to
dev null.
A simple test to see if it is a network problem is to go on the console of the
9000 and telnet back to itself, ie if the system is called hp1, then type
"telnet hp1", if this is slow, try and telnet to the systems ip address, this
avoids hostname resolution, if this is fast then it may well be a dns problem.
good luck.