Slow FTP/Telnet/Samba Connect

[Clayton Carney]

Greetings,

We are experiencing very slow connect times on our server (Windows 98 clients accessing across a 10 Mbs LAN). Utilization on the box rarely exceeds 5%, but connects regularly exceed one minute.

We regularly login to another remote server (56K dial up connection, averaging 100 users and 60% utilization) and get connects in under 10 seconds. Certainly something is wrong with our configuration, but I can not find a source that is obvious to me.

Another twist to this condition is that the behavior is erratic. Ocassionaly, there are no problems. Other times, the first connect is slow and then subsequent connects are reasonable (for a variable period of time). Then there are times when nothing seems to help.

We can ping the server by name or address and get a reply in < 10 ms.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks...

[Rick Garland]

Are the services still slow when trying to connect via IP address as opposed to hostname? If so, there may be some kind of resolution problem. You may want to check the DNS setups for the systems as well as the nsswitch.conf file and see which comes first.

[Clayton Carney]

Thanks Rick,

Connect is about the same; name or IP. However, at the moment, the connects are speedy, whereas half an hour ago they were sluggish. I'll do a comparsion the next time connects are slow.

[Jimmy Rogers]

OK, somebody has to say it, I will.

"It's a network problem!!"

OK, ok, it might not be, but your other server is accessed via modem, thus different network if I read it correctly. I would at least have the network guru's look to see if there is any unusual activity during the slow times. It might be large ftp jobs, heavy internet use, etc.

[Clayton Carney]

Thanks Jimmy,

While anything is possible, I doubt this is the case.

We're in a very small shop with a private network. On average there are only 5 concurrent users on our network; 10 maximum. Compare this to the remote network mentioned, which has hundreds of users.

We have no FTP activity and our internet activity is limited by a 192K connection. So, unless I'm overlooking something, I don't see where we have excessive network traffic.