Server problem - any ideas
 

I've never come across this problem before. Rebooting doesn't help and none of the running processes are taking much in the way of resources or memory....

The pages are served very fast, ssh is fast once in but...

Anything that requires authentication is at a crawl. It takes minutes for SSH to actually login, e-mail is failing because it's taking too long, the server also has webmin running which is at a crawl too. Like I say though everything else is fine from script pages through to mysql queries.

First thought was brute force attack but wouldn't that also be having an affect on overall speed not just authentication stuff? I can also see nothing else to suggest one.

Any suggestions?

I guess you are running on freebsd ... what does "netstat" say ?

kill bind...

see what happens... if your running RH8 and a recent version of bind I'm gussing that will fix it.. I had the same problem and I just use a seperate nameserver.

Alternativly try switching your nameservers to somthing else. It definatly sounds like a DNS problem.

Thanks. Taking far too long to run but results are interesting. Looks like it may be an attack after all.

Certainly not DNS stuff. Bind isn't running on that server as other servers are used for DNS and domains not on this server are fine.

... been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the video !

btw: try switching ssh to another port.

Type:

top

What does it say:

Slow SSH is often a failure in reverse DNS. Your webpages probably have dns resolution off, so they're not affected.

netstat -an should run much faster than netstat, it won't be doing any lookups.

try ping www.gofuckyourself.com
ping www.mit.edu
ping www.ind.net

see how quickly it resolves each of those domains. It's a
worth ruling out anyway.

b.

Last night must have been active.

We got creamed by a pw hack attempt that was only effective as a DOS. Took a while to figure out wtf was going on.

Does anyone share a list of known cracker IP addys? Be easiest to block those fuckers at the router before they even start.