Long authentication times

[Ben Aitchison]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2001 at 12:43:23PM +0200, Chris Picton wrote:
> I am running solid-pop3d reading from an nfs mounted mail spool
> 
> I am using PAM authentication, authenticating off a radius server.
> 
> When I telnet to port 110, and do a user/pass sequence, I have to wait
> about 16 seconds until I get the +OK authentication successful response
> 
> If I run a perl script to check my radius authentication, the response
> is instantaneous.
> Also doing file operations on the mail spool has no delay.
> 
> How can I debug where the delay in authentication is happening?

I was looking through why authentication wasn't instanteous before. 
It's because the whole mail spool for that user is loaded, and checked
to be vaild before an "OK" is sent -- this can have problems for Outlook
Express (maybe others too), which can timeout on large mail boxes.

I tried changing it a while back, to give the OK first, but i can't remember 
what I did if the spool wasn't valid, or other reasons to not give OK and
see if it'd help things and on testing over nfs with large files (just to 
make it go slow :)) it did help things quite a bit.  I haven't tried it on 
anything real though (:

BTW, I've used PAM/radius combination, but it's not that that's causing it,
and my tests were done without it.

Maybe this problem is different to yours though, as you say 16 seconds -- 
and do not mention how large your mail spool is.

Ben.