Telnet taking too long but ping ok

[Leigh Williams]

Hello everyone,

We've got a small drama on our hands here. We've got two hp-ux 10.20 servers that take about 5 minutes to connect to from any PC or terminal on out network. Yet, when you ping them, they get an instantaneous reply. The telnet doesn't time out. Also it doesn't matter if you use the IP address or the host name, the same thing happens. However if you telnet between them they are as uick as they should be. We're all a bit baffled.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

TIA, Leigh

[Printaporn_1]

Hi,

if your PC is win 98 there are some thing like the implementation that take long time negociate between win98 and UX then you have to change some registry key.
I will find out this , if problem only occur on some type of Windows.
that may fall in this case I suspect.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Leigh,

This is a toughie but I have a few suggestions.
First I would like to find out if it's something specific to telnet or might ftp have the same problem.
I suggest that you ftp to the 10.20 boxes from a PC or two and put and get a couple of fairly large files and note the transfer rate. It's actually amazing to me that a speed mismatch between host and switch will still function although very poorly. The transfer rates should tell us that.

Another thing that I have seen which can cause this sort of problem is NIS. Is this a NIS environment?

There are also some telnet/telnetd patches that I would investigate: PHNE_13413 & PHNE_13414.

Also it would help to know just how the telnet responds. Do you get a very slow login prompt or is the login operation itself very slow.
Anything you can do to describe this will help.

I also found the\is link which may apply:
http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=c78b416d1d4fffe635/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000050751227

Hope I given you some food for thought, Clay.

[Bernie Vande Griend]

This sounds like a name resolution issue. What are you using to resolve host names on the Unix servers? hosts file, DNS? If your UNIX server cannot resolve the hostname of your PCs when give its IP address, it will result in long delays with telnet, because telnet is trying to reverse lookup the IP address of those who are connecting to it. Check your /etc/nsswitch.conf file to see how your UNIX servers resolve host names. If it uses hosts at all, put in a dummy name for one of your PCs and try the telnet again. Let us know what you find.

[John Bolene]

SOunds exactly like a DNS problem.
You don't have both the name and IP resolution working for the terminals working.

Try doing a nslookup on both the short name and FQN and IP from the server. You should get good results for all lookups.

[Darrell Allen]

Hello Leigh,

I agree with Bernie. If you try the dummy hosts file entry you should also specify files before dns for the hosts entry in nsswitch.conf so that it will check /etc/hosts first.

Also, check /etc/resolv.conf for nameservers that the HP-UX servers can't reach or for extraneous entries. I once had a co-worker who would list every nameserver he could in resolv.conf but he failed to see if they were able to be reached through the firewall.

Darrell

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Hi Leigh

The console can be connected to the UTP cat s cable since that is also copper and there are Serial to UTP converter available. Once that is done you can telenet it to that port and you are up and running , only thing is that it is on the normal non gui type of screen which is fine.

Manoj Srivastava

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Oops sorry I clicked th wrong one.


Manoj Srivastava

[Joseph C. Denman]

I have had problems like this in the past. 99.9999999% of the time it is a resolution problem. Check with you dns folks. Try doing nslookups on the server, both on ip and hostname.

...jcd...