[lug] Very long network connection times?

[Scott A. Herod]

Hello,

  A question about networking, probably tcpd in particular.  I have
two nearly identical PIIs running RH 6.2 at home that are connected with
ethernet.
One has a linksys card ( BTW, I noticed that the latest tulip driver
will not compile with the headers from 2.4.0 test 7; netdevice.h has
changed ) and the other a 3Com card.  The two machines have IP addresses
in 192.0.2.*, the netmask on each is 255.255.255.0, the gateway on
each is set to 192.0.2.254.

  They live on an isolated network ( the ultimate firewall ) so I
have no actual machine acting as 192.0.2.254.  Neither is
supposed to use DNS according to linuxconf, they are in each
other's /etc/hosts file.  Neither machine has routing enabled.

  However, when I telnet from the 3Com machine to the linksys machine
I get an immediate response.  When I telnet from the linksys machine
to the 3Com machine it takes about 2 minutes before the prompt
actually appears.  ( rlogin and ftp are similar. )  Even if I do
"ftp localhost" on the 3Com machine, it takes about 2 minutes for
a prompt to show up.

  Can anyone suggest where else to look for a problem?  Does linuxconf
lie about the DNS look-up?  I use the 3Com machine for dial-up access
and had it using DNS so that that would work, but told linuxconf to
turn off DNS while I was trying to fix my internal network slowness.

  If the issue is tcpd trying to do name verification, why would one
machine be different from the other?

Thanks for your help,

Scott