[plug] Ubuntu woes

[Patrick Coleman]

On 6/18/08, Steve Baker <steve at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> Hi Plug,
>
>  I have a weird problem, I'm hoping someone can help.
>
>  I have a PC with 4GB RAM and a quad core CPU, with Intel 945 graphics and
> lots of discs on an Adaptec SATA RAID card.  I also have a Dell Latitude
> D820 laptop with 4GB and dual core CPU and nvidia graphics chipset.
>
>  Both systems run Ubuntu 8.04.  The laptop is perfectly fine - runs
> everything really well, fast, full compiz effects, etc. etc.  The PC is
> crap.  It's very very slow to boot, running aptitude safe-upgrade can take
> yonks, particularly if there is a kernel update and it has to run
> update-initrd.
>  Disk i/o *seems* to be OK; I un-tarred a tgz file approx 300Mb and it
> unpacked quite quickly.  Network throughput seems to be normal.  I haven't
> run any CPU benchmarks, don't know what would give me any useful results.
>
>  When I log in, it can take 30secs or more after accepting the password
> before I get the $ prompt.  (This is NOT the well-known ssh reverse lookup
> timeout problem).  Sometimes when running a command (especially with a
> larger on-disk program size, eg. vi) it takes a few seconds to load the
> program, more than I would expect.

You're not running LDAP on it, are you? I've seen similar issues with
machines that are bound to LDAP (/etc/nsswitch.conf) but can't contact
the LDAP server.

The other thing to look for might be an NFS mount that can't contact the server.

-Patrick

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