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Date:      Fri, 2 Jun 2000 15:48:00 +1200
From:      Dave Preece <dave.preece@kbgroup.co.nz>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   No login day. Serious hassle.
Message-ID:  <67B808B0DD93D211ABEE0000B498356B2B4EA4@internet.kbgroup.co.nz>

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Since it doesn't (as yet) involve any source code I thought I'd send this
here and not to -hackers.

Headache central. I run sshd and connect to my box through SecureCRT (an
actually very good ssh client for Win32). Came in this morning and it
wouldn't login. We could connect at layer 4, and some daemon and backgroud
software I left running is fine, but not login as such. Since I mess around
with firewalls a lot and locking myself out is not uncommon, I have a
(shite) console connected to the serial port and can get a root login from
here. So I got inetd up (normally disabled) and normal telnetd going and
tried to connect again. The client connects instantly, but then takes ages
(like, a minute) to get a login prompt. Not good, but at least I'm in.

Once in, I waded through /var/log and could find nothing. Running ethereal
onto a new telnet session showed what was happening (kinda):

The three way handshake was completed and telnet opened the batting with the
"Do suppress go ahead" command, which was acked. Then nothing for 75
seconds. It then continues and goes through to the ack for "Login:" within
0.5 seconds, as to be expected. Quite why, I don't know. I've seen a similar
problem to this before, but on that occasion I had the default router set to
an address not on the local subnet, and fixing that solved the login
problem.

On a hunch I decided to have a look at the arp cache with arp -a, which
didn't seem to want to complete (ctrl-C'd it), then arp -na completed and
appeared to solve all my problems. Everything goes fine, but there is still
a significant gap (1.5 seconds) from "do suppress go ahead" to the next
command.

So, while I am 'fixed', I still have no idea what went wrong or why. It
seems there was some kind of corruption in the arp cache that was causing a
timeout to happen much the same as when I did something stupid with the
default router. Is this the case? What can I do to prevent it? And why did
it render sshd totally unable to login?

A bit confused, but protective of uptime.
Dave :)







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