rlogin and telnet over network hanging

[David Gingold]

Users of our Sun 4/280 who have been remotely logging in via the Internet
have occasionally been having problems establishing rlogin and telnet
sessions.  'netstat' reports that tese sessions are ESTABLISHED and in a
CLOSE_WAIT state.  The users just see their rlogin command hang - they get
no response from our Sun.

The problem is intermittent on the Sun, and it doesn *not* happen on our
Vax which sits on the same Ethernet and is configured like the Sun.  Users
get around the hanging sessions by doing an rlogin to the Vax, and then
doing an rlogin from there to the Sun.  The hanging session problem only
happens when users are establishing the connection over the slow,
sometimes unreliable Internet.  (We are running SunOS 4.0.1 on the Sun,
and Ultrix 3.0 on the Vax.)

Any thoughts about what is causing this and how to fix it?  Has anyone
seen this problem before?

David Gingold 			gingold at think.com
Thinking Machines Corporation 	(617) 876-1111