Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Slow SSH Connection Time

I got 99 problems but SSH ain't one...

I'm not much of a sysadmin, so when I noticed it takes me awhile to SSH into my tiny little $50 server I got off Ebay, I chocked it up to the slow clock speed. I ran into some benchmarks for the OpenSSH client/server pair today however, and how it should take less than a second on incredibly old hardware, so I decided to do a little debugging. Moments after running SSH in verbose mode I saw my issue.

My SSH client was running into some error code performing GSSAPI authentication and kept retrying for a number of seconds before trying to use my key. I don't know much about GSSAPI but I know enough about it to know that I'm not using it. After disabling it on my server SSH connects almost instantly.