This article is from a FAQ concerning SCO operating systems. While some of the information may be applicable to any OS, or any Unix or Linux OS, it may be specific to SCO Xenix, Open Desktop or Openserver.

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TCP/IP and NFS FAQ

Telnet/FTP is very slow to connect

Slow telnet or ftp connections are often caused by the server wanting to do a reverse DNS lookup to find out who is connecting. If you aren't running DNS, you can fix this just by listing all the machines in /etc/hosts. Note that you don't have to be accurate about the names: I often use the ip adress with "_" substituted for the "."'s, like "host_192_168_2_3" and so on. A simple script:

#!/bin/ksh
x=1
while [ $x -lt 255 ]
do
echo "192.168.2.$x host_$x"
x=$((x + 1 ))
done >> /etc/hosts

Understand that being slow to give up on name resolution is an annoyance on small networks and a Good Thing on large networks. Systems that give up quickly work well on small networks, but don't get the information they should have on larger nets.

If you are seeing a login but it takes a long time for the password prompt to appear after logging in on a SCO box, see User login hangs for many seconds before password prompt comes up (SCO 5.0.5 and 5.0.6 )

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