[Bug 1691901] Re: 50-motd-news costs 5 seconds every login on firewalled systems

[Steve Langasek]

I've adjusted the bug description to match my understanding of the
actual problem.

AIUI this does not happen on a disconnected system; if motd.ubuntu.com
cannot resolve or returns ECONNREFUSED or EHOSTUNREACH, there should be
no 5-second delay.  The error only happens on a system which has routes,
but has a firewall that drops packets instead of responding to the
request.  (Or when motd.u.c is actually down.)

So, what you appear to be describing here is a deliberate design
tradeoff.  Unless you are recommending a different timeout (if so, what
value?) or asking for this to be disabled altogether (in which case I
will refer you to Dustin), I think the only solution here is for your
lab to have suitable firewall+proxy settings.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1691901

Title:
  50-motd-news costs 5 seconds every login on firewalled systems

Status in base-files package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I noticed quite a long time to login to some of my systems via ssh (or scp).
  Investigating lead me to find out that the '50-motd-news' file
  (/etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news) was the primary cost.

  In line 108 [1] it does something like:
   curl --connect-timeout "5" --max-time "5" -A "..." -o - https://motd.ubuntu.com

  The systems I'm seeing this on are in a lab and do not have access to https://motd.ubuntu.com.
  The way the lab is configured, they just end up timing out.  So every scp or ssh connection
  or other path to trigger update-motd will cost 5 seconds.

  --
  [1] https://git.launchpad.net/~usd-import-team/ubuntu/+source/base-files/tree/update-motd.d/50-motd-news?h=applied/ubuntu/zesty#n108

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.04
  Package: base-files 9.6ubuntu13
  ProcVersionSignature: User Name 4.10.0-21.23-generic 4.10.11
  Uname: Linux 4.10.0-21-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.20.4-0ubuntu4
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Fri May 19 01:11:30 2017
  Ec2AMI: ami-0000004f
  Ec2AMIManifest: FIXME
  Ec2AvailabilityZone: nova
  Ec2InstanceType: m1.small
  Ec2Kernel: unavailable
  Ec2Ramdisk: unavailable
  ProcEnviron:
   TERM=xterm-256color
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: base-files
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
  mtime.conffile..etc.update-motd.d.50-motd-news: 2017-05-19T01:10:25.572110

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