UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have taken an old Pentium-75 Compaq with 32Mb memory, formatted the hard drive, and loaded Redhat 5.2 on it. All I really want is an ftp server to allow vendors to download files from it as they need them. I was told that these old pentiums with little memory would work well with Linux. The ftp server is functional, but connections, even within our network(ethernet LAN), seem to take a long time (+120 Seconds). Any ideas where I can get info on what might be taking so long and how to fix it?

Check your dns settings. Usually Linux will try to resolve the hostname of any machine that connects to it. If your DNS is not working properly you may experience a delay. You can also just add the machine names to your /etc/hosts file if you have a small network.

Thanks, PxT...The host file worked, so that's a fall back, but I'm going to check into the dns on there...might have missed something. What's the best way to keep the average user in the pub directory, and not permit them to go anywhere else?