HP-UX

Noting these lines from your log of your ssh session:

Code:

 
Last successful login: Fri Sep 28 14:52:23 METDST 2012 10.4.3.97
Last authentication failure: Fri Sep 28 14:52:16 METDST 2012 10.4.3.97
Last login: Fri Sep 28 14:52:43 2012 from 10.4.3.97

When I run a log on my HP-UX 11.31 box with:

Code:

 
ssh -v -v -v root@127.0.0.1

the lines for me give me hosts names, not IP addresses.

This means the login process is doing a revese lookup on the IP address to provide a host name, and that requires it either have the entry in /etc/hosts, or the hosts be correctly set up to use dns.

For your servers that do not have an /etc/resolv.conf file, you are not set up correctly to use dns and this means that the delay is most likely caused by the reverse lookup timing out, because the host can't find a dns server to use (how could it? It's not configured.)

For the systems that do have an /etc/resolv.conf file, you may want to check that the XXX and YYY servers are actually dns servers, and you can ping them from the current host in question, and that you are searching on the correct network domain(s).

As a simple test ... on the system that does not have an /etc/resolv.conf file set up,
can you change the /etc/nsswitch.conf file hosts entry to:

Code:

hosts: files

removing the rest of the line? In this way you tell the system not to look for a dns server if you can't find the entry in /etc/hosts, and therefore it will decide to return the IP Address on the reverse lookup more quickly.