I recently noticed a mysterious delay at connection startup while
using an SSH jump host, and investigated it in case it was a bug in
the new jump host code that ought to be fixed before 0.77 goes out.
strace showed that at the time of the delay PuTTY was doing a DNS
lookup for the destination host, which was hanging due to the
authoritative DNS server in question not being reachable. But that was
odd, because I'd configured it to leave DNS lookup to the proxy,
anticipating exactly that problem.
But on closer investigation, the _proxy_ code was doing exactly what
I'd told it. The DNS lookup was coming from somewhere else: namely, an
(unsuccessful) attempt to set up a GSSAPI context. The GSSAPI library
had called gethostbyname, completely separately from PuTTY's own use
of DNS.
Simple workaround for me: turn off GSSAPI, which doesn't work for that
particular SSH connection anyway, and there's no point spending 30
seconds faffing just to find that out.
But also, if that puzzled me, it's worth documenting!
This is the README for PuTTY, a free Windows and Unix Telnet and SSH
client.
PuTTY is built using CMake <https://cmake.org/>. To compile in the
simplest way (on any of Linux, Windows or Mac), run these commands in
the source directory:
cmake .
cmake --build .
Documentation (in various formats including Windows Help and Unix
`man' pages) is built from the Halibut (`.but') files in the `doc'
subdirectory using `doc/Makefile'. If you aren't using one of our
source snapshots, you'll need to do this yourself. Halibut can be
found at <https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/>.
The PuTTY home web site is
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
If you want to send bug reports or feature requests, please read the
Feedback section of the web site before doing so. Sending one-line
reports saying `it doesn't work' will waste your time as much as
ours.
See the file LICENCE for the licence conditions.