Putty is sometimes slow to prompt for the password, today I finally determined what the problem was, it is apparently doing a reverse dns lookup when I ssh into an address and of course a 192.168.0.133 can’t be found. I fixed it by adding entries for the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts for myself and the other computer.
127.0.0.1 iris2
192.168.0.103 iris2
192.168.0.133 ic2d1
I discovered this because I was playing around with the simple webserver.py from and it was taking 5 seconds to respond. Using google I searched for:
BaseHTTPRequestHandler send_response slow
And looked at the first entry which was:
http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/3481
Here they explained that trac could also be slow because of reverse dns lookup. After some searching I figured out that /etc/hosts was used for local lookups so I added an entry for 192.168.0.103 iris2 and 192.168.0.133 ic2d1. This resolved the issue for the webserver. It then dawned on me that this might also be the problem on Putty.
I searched on google for:
windows xp hosts
And found this:
http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/how_to_use_hosts.html
Which says that the hosts file is in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc. Well there was no such file, so I added it and sure enough, that fixed Putty.