Networking problems with SuSE Enterprise Desktop 10

I recently bought an HP 2133 subnotebook with SuSE Enterprise
Desktop 10 SP1. I have the following problem:

Whenever I attempt to make SSH or FTP connections from this box
to the Internet, the connection gets to the other side, and the password
authentication gets completed all right. However, at that point the
connection just hangs, apparently forever. If I try to connect from the
Internet to this box, exactly the same thing happens: Authentication OK,
connection hanging after that.

This what I know not to be the problem:

1) The Internet connection: If instead of using the 2133 notebook
I use some other PC running some other Linux distribution, everything
works as expected. The setup is exactly the same in both cases, in the
sense that both machines use the same network cable (not at the same
time, of course :-)

2) The SuSE distribution comes with some firewalling rules. The
behavior described is exactly the same, regardless of whether or not this
firewall is running.

3) The one thing that seems to work fine is the HTTP protocol,
for I can use my browser and visit all sorts of sites in the Internet
without any problems.

Any ideas where to look for the cause of this behavior? It's
clearly something to do with the way the distribution is configured; it's
not something SSH- or FTP-specific alone.

Harold Weissman wrote:

> I recently bought an HP 2133 subnotebook with SuSE Enterprise
> Desktop 10 SP1. I have the following problem:
>
> Whenever I attempt to make SSH or FTP connections from this box
> to the Internet, the connection gets to the other side, and the
> password authentication gets completed all right. However, at that
> point the connection just hangs, apparently forever. If I try to
> connect from the Internet to this box, exactly the same thing happens:
> Authentication OK, connection hanging after that.

> Any ideas where to look for the cause of this behavior?

Just two thoughts:
What type of user authentication are you using? In case it is LDAP try
to (re)start nscd prior to a login attempt.
In case you use hostbased authentication for ssh check the permissions
of ssh-keysign. If you are not allowed to read the private key
in /etc/ssh as a user it can't be verified. But then this should not
result in a hang but just a password prompt.

f'up comp.os.linux.networking

Günther