Login behavior

[phil cook]

Experiencing a delay between entering password & any response when connecting to an 11.00 machine. Happens with everyone's login. Can anyone suggest what may be up?

[James R. Ferguson]

Phil:

If you are telneting and you are running DNS, it is likely that this delay is due to reverse-name-lookup.

...JRF...

[phil cook]

I think DNS is fine as when telneting to the machine response is very quick, but after you type your password & press enter there is a long pause before the usual messages & then your shell.

[Andreas Voss]

Hi,

look at /etc/profile what's in there that could do something that takes time.

Regards

[John Palmer]

Hi Phil,

Could this be a 'quota' problem?

You could try mounting filesystems (especially NFS) with the 'noquota' option.

Regards,
John

[phil cook]

Quotas are not being used at all on this machine, & NFS is not used either. The /etc/profile is straight out of the box & has nothing unusual in it.

Phil

[Victor BERRIDGE]

If you are connected to the machine, what is the output of top?
Have you no defunct process with/or orphaned processes eating all your resource?
you know idle time 0%, system >50% nice>20%...
(it happens sometime with mozilla, lp...)

Just thoughts
Victor

[John Palmer]

Anything unusual about btmp, utmp or wtmp?

Regards,
John

[phil cook]

There are no defunct/orphan processes running & the machine is virtually idle. All we running on this machine is IGNITE-UX, NTP & a small web server that collates sysadmin stats for other nodes. This delay has been present since I took this job but has remained a mystery. 2 days ago the machine was rebooted for another reason & this has had no effect.

Phil

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Another thought..
I had a similar case when someone connected on one of our networks a machine badly configured (put full duplex on a 10BT...).

[phil cook]

I've tried zeroing the wtmp & btmp files - not sure what I can do with the utmp file. Still no effect.

As for the lan connection the box is set up as per other machines on the same router & everything seems normal. Once connected the response through the telnet is also normal - if there were problems one would presume all lan activity would be affected.

Phil

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Phil:

Another thought/question. From the man pages for 'login':

If /etc/group is linked to /etc/logingroup, and group membership for the user trying to log in is managed by NIS, and no NIS server is able to respond, login waits until a server does respond.

Is this the case, perhaps?

...JRF...

[James R. Ferguson]

Phil:

Another thought/question. From the man pages for 'login':

If /etc/group is linked to /etc/logingroup, and group membership for the user trying to log in is managed by NIS, and no NIS server is able to respond, login waits until a server does respond.

Is this the case, perhaps?

...JRF...

[James R. Ferguson]

Phil:

Another thought/question. From the man pages for 'login':

If /etc/group is linked to /etc/logingroup, and group membership for the user trying to log in is managed by NIS, and no NIS server is able to respond, login waits until a server does respond.

Is this the case, perhaps?

...JRF...

[Victor BERRIDGE]

I also thought of that, which brigs me to wonder if you use NDS or NIS how is configured your /etc/nsswitch.conf?

[phil cook]

Ok - so even though NIS is not configured on this machine somebody has obviously had a go at some point - nsswitch.conf contained instructions to query NIS services. Removing these entries has cleared the problem straight away.

Thanks very much for everyone's help. Only a little thing but it was bugging me.

Phil

[James R. Ferguson]

Phil:

Great...and thanks for posting what you found! Regards, Jim.

...JRF...