Saturday, September 26, 2015

Oracle Linux - SSH slow login

When you run a lot of test installations of Oracle Linux, like I do on my laptop and my home Oracle VM installation, you do not have them all configured in DNS. When hopping from Linux machine to Linux machine using SSH you do often have the situation that there is a long time between the moment you enter your username and the moment you are asked for the password. Reason for this is that the SSH deamon by default will try to do a DNS lookup to retrieve the machine name from DNS that you use to login to. When running Oracle Linux in a operational environment where you most likely need to have an audit trail this is absolutely a good way of working. However, in case you run multiple lab an play machines in your local environment this is not needed and the wait between the moment you enter your username and the moment you are asked for the password is quickly becoming an annoyance.

To change the behaviour of the SSH deamon you will need to change the configuration file /etc/ssh/sshd_config. You have to ensure that UseDNS no is included in the file. Standard deployment of Oracle Linux is that UseDNS yes is commented out of the configuration. The default behavior is already set to yes so you have to explicitly include "UseDNS no". To esure that the settings are applied restart the service after you made the changes to the file.

[root@localhost ~]# service sshd restart
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl restart  sshd.service
[root@localhost ~]#

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