Sometimes happens that establishing of SSH (or other service) connection takes a really long time. This is often caused by failed reverse DNS lookups.

That situation can occur because of network problems or can be intentional action performed by system administrator.

How can you handle with it? Simply add this line to your sshd_config file.

UseDNS no

Now SSH connection should be established significantly faster.

After many years of use plain hard drives for data storage I decided to buy small and inexpensive server. I found HP Microserver N40L. This hardware contains 1.5GHz AMD Turion processor and 4GB ECC RAM. It’s a real server despite it’s size. It’s running with FreeNAS and works as home NAS. Here is a photo of my server (without case).

hp-n40l