landscape-sysinfo very slow when remote mounts are unavailable

[Andrew Brett]

Binary package hint: landscape-client

When my machine has mounted samba shares which are no longer available (because the remote machine is down), landscape-sysinfo times out when trying to get usage details for the mount. If several mounts are present, this can cause the script to take several minutes to complete, leading to extremely slow ssh logins for no discernable reason. It took me several hours to get to the bottom of why my ssh sessions were taking so long to establish.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Feb 10 11:19:29 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/landscape-sysinfo
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.6
Package: landscape-common 1.4.0-0ubuntu0.9.10.0 [modified: usr/share/pyshared/landscape/sysinfo/landscapelink.py usr/share/pyshared/landscape/lib/disk.py]
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-17.54-server
SourcePackage: landscape-client
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-17-server x86_64

[pedemoz (pedemoz)]

Same problem with much the same setup (9.10 amd64). SSH login was taking exactly 60 seconds. Some apps that rely on ssh (FreeNX for example) were failing due to timeouts. Verbose output of an ssh login showed that it was pausing for 60 seconds after "Entering interactive session".

The problem for me was the same as for Andrew (the OP) - an smb/cifs mount was unavailable. (I could never determine why ssh login was fast from Windows using Putty - surely Linux ssh couldn't be slower than Windows... But the smb share from the server was to the Windows box I was testing from and thus always available when testing.)

The solution, again the same as for Andrew and as described on his website, was to modify the Message Of The Day (MOTD) script so that it ignores smb/cifs mounts. Simply add the following to "/usr/share/pyshared/landscape/lib/disk.py" (after "except ValueError: continue:")...

       if filesystem == "cifs":
            continue

There are numerous forum reports about slow ssh login - I wonder how many are due to the same problem?

P.