Hi all.

My first post here (this is posted elsewhere). I've been using Ubuntu Server edition (Hardy) happily for some time now. I use sudo regularly during configuration of new services. It always works/authorises within seconds, however, it recently became very slow, to the point of being nearly unusable. It turns out that ANY authentication request stalls in this way - in in a plain shell, X or Gnome, via VNC (and even FTP seems affected).

In /var/log/auth.log I noticed a regular working pattern like this:

Feb 3 14:07:20 kanyo sudo: lee : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/usr/share/obm/www ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Feb 3 14:07:25 kanyo sudo: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by lee(uid=0)
Feb 3 14:07:30 kanyo sudo: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root

Unfortunately now, these records look the same, but the timestamps are much wider apart (minutes). The problem occured after running synaptic and dpkg-reconfigure obm-conf. I was trying to remove 'OBM' (www dot obm dot org) completely as I'd messed up (just OBM) while trying to fix a minor-looking misconfiguration.

Any idea what I've broken and how to fix it?

I've carefully analysed which files were altered (modified) during my changes (as the problem survives a reboot), but there are no likely-looking candidates in the list (I deleted some blank lock files). I also did a wireshark capture during an authentication session and noticed that it doesn't appear to be looking off the server for information (I had likewise-open installed, but the problem exists whether that is running or not).

Research in the forums hinted that this might just be as simple as a bad /etc/hosts file - but /etc/hosts has not been modified. I may have a flawed DNS, but I get fast enough responses to nslookup and can access Internet etc.

Any help much appreciated.

Regards,

Lee