At 21:26 +0200 13/5/97, David A. Gatwood wrote:
[snip]
>What's odd is, ping works both ways, telnet doesn't work either way, and
>it takes the NetBSD box an incredible amount of time to find a route
>through that pppd link... the reverse isn't as bad, netstat -r takes
>forever on either platform.  ping on the linux box is almost instant.
>ping on the NetBSD box takes somewhere around a minute (haven't timed it)
>before it starts returning anything.  Weird.

Your timing problems could come from the fact that both machines try to
resolve the name of each other through a non-existant nameserver.
Therefore, they would wait for the timeout of the resolver routines before
producing numeric results.

Try netstat -rn as a test. If that returns immediately, you've got your
answer here.

Keep in mind also that some non-obvious stuff might be doing lookups as
well, like tcp wrapper or syslogging, although syslogging should do that
async.

If you want to speed things up, you can:

1. run an 'empty' nameserver, or one filled with your favourite in-house
domain. Just don't connect to the Internet then... This option might prove
to be a waste of resources....

2. Config your machines to not use DNS at all. There is a file somewhere in
/etc that gives the order of lookups between /etc/hosts, DNS, and NIS.
Leave only /etc/hosts in there, and comment out the others. For the fancy
names, you can put them in your /etc/hosts on both sides.

Hope this helps...

Michel, Networking Guru Of The Minute (TM) ;-)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michel Lanners                  | " Read Philosophy.  Study Art.
9, Montee St. Crepin            |   Ask Questions.  Make Mistakes.
L-1365 Luxembourg               |
email   mlan@selection-line.net |   Learn Always. "