[Herts] Webmin / SSL / FTP(?) and Reverse DNS!

[Ian Gregory]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 10:11:16AM -0000, Nicolas Pike wrote:
 
> My logon from a private address or from my NTL cable address to Webmin
> (secured with SSL, on either a local or remote server) is very slow. I have
> investigated extensively and it would appear to be a problem with reverse
> DNS lookup failing.
> Now the solutions I have seen involve adding DNS entries, which is a
> complexity I did not really need.. After all the cable address will change
> and the private address, well it is ?kind of? private anyway.
> Some of the articles I read said you could add entries to hosts file, but I
> could not make this work / find examples of it. Would it need an
> in-address-arpa (whatever it was called) entry!!

Not sure about Webmin (what is it?) but I think I understand the
general principle. Take the example of ssh from CLIENT to SERVER.
The first thing that SERVER knows is that it has a connection from
some particular IP address and it will usually want to look this up
to obtain a hostname. Normally SERVER would look in its own host
table first, so if you can add an entry there for CLIENT that should
work (just a single line, you don't need separate forward and reverse
entries in the host table). If it can't find it there it will try to
find the IP address in dns (a reverse lookup) and this is where the
long delay can occur while dns times out.

Ian