Telnet sessions

[Vibert Hart]

Hi,

I noticed that telnet session from clients on my LAN/WAN are taking about 15 sec to establish connection with the HP9000 server. Pinging any machine including the HP9000 server gives a response time of less the 10ms. We have recently segmented the LAN servers from the workstations and of course routers are used to connect from remote locations. Is there anything I can do to RPC on the HP server to speed up to connection time?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

This sounds like a DNS reverse-name lookup timing issue. Are you using DNS? Try pinging by hostname and by IPaddress. If this is a reverse lookup problem, the ping by hostname should be slower than by IPaddress. IF this is the case, define your clients to DNS or put them in your /etc/hosts file and specify the following in /etc/nsswitch.conf:

hosts: files [NOTFOUND=continue] dns

...JRF...

[Mark Chandler_1]

James' suggestion is fine for LAN's where the desktops have static IP's. However, I've been struggling with a situation where a client uses DHCP to allocate IP's to desktops. Static reverse DNS entries are not appropriate there.
The only solution I can think of is to implement an internal DNS server using Windows2000 which not only supports dynamic DNS based on DHCP, but also supports dynamic reverse DNS. WinNT 4.0 doesn't support dynamic reverse DNS.
The Unix systems would then use the W2K server as the primary resolver and have no trouble looking up the name of a connecting workstation.
Looks good on the whiteboard so far :)

[Quin Hammes]

I ran into the same problem. I found one quick solution is to hack your /etc/hosts file. I created a quick script which loop 255 times for the subnet which my client's dhcp ips were on and included false host names. I am not sure if they is appropiate in your environment but it worked real good when I used it. Here is an example of what I am talking about.

clients dhcp ips are 128.10.10.1 through 5
add the following lines to /etc/host

128.10.10.1 dhcp1
128.10.10.2 dhcp2
128.10.10.3 dhcp3
128.10.10.4 dhcp4
128.10.10.5 dhcp5

Since the system could not look up these addresses before, it can't hurt to give it some made up host names. Of course this might be more tricky if you have alot of DHCP ips.