Now here's a weird one...

One of the problems I've been working on since the upgrade to Solaris 10 has been the slowness of the SunRay terminals. There are a few different problems here, but one of 'em is that after typing in your password and hitting Enter, it takes about a minute to get the JDS "Loading your desktop…" icons up.

I scratched my head over this one for a long time 'til I saw this:

ptree 10533
906   /usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -daemon -udpPort 0
  10445 /usr/dt/bin/dtlogin -daemon -udpPort 0
```
10533 /bin/ksh /usr/dt/config/Xstartup
  10551 /bin/ksh -p /opt/SUNWut/lib/utdmsession -c 4
    10585 /bin/ksh -p /etc/opt/SUNWut/basedir/lib/utscrevent -c 4 -z utdmsession
      10587 ksh -c echo 'CREATE_SESSION 4 # utdmsession' >/dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/7013

which just sat there and sat there for, oh, about a minute. So I run netcat on port 7013, log out and log in again, and boom! quick as anything.

/etc/services says:

utscreventd     7013/tcp                        # SUNWut SRCOM event deamon

which we're not running; something to do with smart cards. So why does it hang so long? Because for some reason, the host isn't sending back an RST packet (I presume; can't listen to find out) to kill the connection, like it does on $other_server.

So now I'm trying to figure out why that is. It's not the firewall; they're identical. I've tried looking at ndd /dev/tcp \? but I don't see anything obvious there. My google-fu doesn't appear to be up to the task either. I may have to cheat and go visit a fellow sysadmin to find out.