[svlug] Huge ping times

[Rick Moen]

begin  J. Paul Reed quotation:
 
> I was reading some docs, and I found out that I should be able to ping the
> ip addr of the card itself as a diagnostic; I tried that, and no dice...at
> least not right away. I left it running, and noticed that I would
> eventually get pings to the ip address of the ethernet card itself back,
> with times anywhere from 200 to 400 SECONDS.

I've found that sometimes VA Linux's support knowledgebase is helpful for
these sorts of things.  You can find it from VA's support pages, on which
their "Knowledge Base" [sic] link takes you to
http://www5.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/varesearch/ .

Searching there for "ping", I found incident #000824-0001, which sounds
as if it might be your problem:

---<snip>---

Description:
My VA machine is giving me absurdly long ping times, on the order of
multiple minutes long.  

Solution: 
Recent versions of the VA system load include a version of the ping
command that attempts to do a reverse DNS lookup on all target
addresses. If either a DNS nameserver cannot be reached, or the target
IP address does not reverse, you will see long apparent delays before
ping returns results -- which is easily confused with ethernet hardware
problems. You can verify that this is the nature of your problem by
disabling ping's DNS support using its "-n" (numeric) option.

The problem is best addressed by ensuring that your machines have
correct, matching forward and reverse entries in the DNS. Short of that,
one temporary solution is to manually add static entries for all hosts
of interest into your Linux machine's /etc/hosts file.  

---<snip>---

(Of course, that might not be it at all.  In which case, you'll need
to pursue the matter with your vendor.)

-- 
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