[BlueOnyx:22935] Re: Strange delay problem

[Darren Shea]

Michael,
     I was all set to dismiss your suggestion, since I had checked the
problem server's own DNS server, and it was fine, but if I knew for sure
what was happening, I wouldn't have needed to ask for help in the first
place, and I had even mentioned to my boss that when I thought of BlueOnyx
master gurus, your name was the first one I thought of. OK, time to set
aside my assumptions and ego...

     So, I ran the nslookup command as you suggested, and I got an immediate
correct response. A reverse DNS query on that IP also came back normal -
still, I took a look at the resolv.conf settings, and there were 3 servers
listed. I went into nslookup, and found that the first of the three was not
actually responding to queries. Further investigation found some DNS server
problems on the first listed server, and after I fixed that, the problem was
gone. That was it! Thank you, good sir!

This does raise a relevant question, though... What is the purpose of the
"Hostname Lookups" under the FTP server, if having the checkbox off doesn't
actually turn it off? Is there a second reverse DNS setting hidden
somewhere? Anyway, I had not been monitoring that one DNS server because it
had never failed when the other services (which I had been monitoring
forever) on the server were still running, and that omission has now been
corrected.

Again, thank you for your rapid and completely on-target diagnosis!

Thank you,
    Darren
    ECPI/Western Broadband
    (512)257-1077

Hi Darren,

> I'm running a 5208R system [...]
> ------------------
> Here's the weird part - I can still FTP to the system, but there is a 10
> second delay in between when I hit enter and it asks for my username. This
> delay is always the same, regardless of whether I use a FQDN or the IP
> address. After that, it works normally.
> 
> SMTP is similar - I'm getting timeouts during the authentication phase
when
> my client (iPhone) is trying to send, but if it keeps trying, it does
> eventually connect, and at that point, the message sends just fine.

It looks like your server is unable to resolve domain names.

Try this from the command line:

nslookup blueonyx.it

That should return something that includes these lines:

Non-authoritative answer:



Name:   blueonyx.it



Address: 38.114.102.4

If it doesn't, then your server can't resolve domain names in which case
your /etc/resolv.conf is either missing the "nameserver <IP>" lines, or
the nameservers listed there don't answer.

In that case take a look at your /etc/resolv.conf file. It should look
somewhat like this:

[root at sol ~]# cat /etc/resolv.conf
# /etc/resolv.conf
# Auto-generated file. file.
search smd.net
domain smd.net
#END of auto-generated code.  Customize beneath this line.
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 4.2.2.2

Does it have at least one "nameserver" line with the IP of a working
nameserver behind it?