Admin Life Errors, Fixes, and Encounters

freebsd sshd authentication slow

With Freebsd, the DNS lookup timeout in sshd is very long.
If for whatever reason your DNS servers are slow, SSHing into FreeBSD will also be slow.

Quick fix is to change /etc/resolve.conf and add opendns.com's nameservers

# vi etc/resolve.conf

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

After the change, ssh authentication was faster for me.

You can also try to restart sshd

# cd /etc/rc.d
# ./sshd restart

Which may help...