[SunHELP] Summary: Difference in "time to prompt" for root vs. any other us er with O penSSH on Sol 8 2/02

[William Enestvedt]

I have no idea just what fixed this problem relating to a "dead" space of
time between the appearance of the login banner and a shell prompt appearing
during SSH sessions.
   From list readers, I received several suggestions that related to name
resolution. However, I had already tried hard-coding entries in the
/etc/hosts files with no luck. I noticed that the nscd (Name Service Caching
Daemon) was disabled, so I re-started it but nothing changed immediately. I
hid all the "dot file" in my home directory -- .profile, .Xauthority, etc.
-- and suddenly the lag was gone!
   The mysterious part is that I disabled nscd and put the "dot files" back,
and the lag between the banner appearing and a shell prompt didn't return.
In fact, the lag disappeared for *all* users. I'm still scratching my head
about this, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
   Thanks for all the suggestions.
-wde
--
Will Enestvedt
UNIX System Administrator
Johnson & Wales University -- Providence, RI

> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Enestvedt [mailto:Will.Enestvedt at jwu.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 1:24 PM
> Subject: [SunHELP] Difference in "time to prompt" for root vs. any other
user with O penSSH on Sol 8 2/02
> 
> 
> I have a Sun Fire V100 with OpenSSH 3.4p1 installed on it. 
> When I connect as root, I get a prompt almost instantly, 
> but if I log in as a regular user -- any of them -- it 
> takes nearly thirty seconds (though the logon banner 
> prints immediately, and only an functioning prompt lags 
> behind).
>    I experience this when logging in from PC's or Suns (so 
> it's not a client platform thing), and from systems with 
> static and DHCP-assigned IP addresses (so it's not DNS 
> lookup-related). This happened under 3.1p1 and still with 3.4p1.
>    I edited the file '/etc/ssh/ssh_prng_cmds' as suggested 
> at http://bucc.buu.ac.th/~jim/sysadmin/openssh.html but there 
> was no improvement (so I don't think it's entropy-related: 
> that is, the SSH connection is up, but the shell is slow to 
> launch).
>    Any ideas? Thanks in advance.