Strange Telnet Problem

[doug mielke]

When a consistant failure lasts a brief period, I poke aroung in arp and routing tables, since these things may 'fix' themselves, by deleteing faulty entries, after a period of inactivity.

Is there a possibility of a address/route conflict somewhere?

[Ben Ransom]

I had a similar problem, ended up being caused by messed up nis database. I found the source of trouble by making a "files" only nsswitch.conf on the machine that I could not telnet or remsh from. (It is HPUX 10.20).
##cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
services: files
ethers: files
netmasks: files
networks: files
protocols: files
rpc: files
services: files
netgroup: files
publickey: files
automount: files
aliases: files

Then try `telnet localhost` or other hostname that is in /etc/hosts .

At least with this you can be sure it is only doing lookups on the machine in question instead of allowing for trouble to come from bad service ports (i.e. if services come from messy NIS data) or mystery dns problems.
-Ben