sudo pause or delay

If I run "sudo ls" for example, it pauses for about 2 minutes before running the command. It does this for anything I run via sudo. I have no idea where to start looking...

 

12hrs later the problem seems to have disappeared, I haven't changed anything or rebooted...

 

And, it's back. I tried strace, but nothing useful came of that. Any suggestions on debugging this?

 

What distribution are you using? Any errors in your logs?

 

My bad, I'm using fedora:
2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.x86_64

The problem comes and goes which is very frustrating.

The error_log, messages doesn't have anything of note. I couldn't find anything in the logs.

 

Strange. But you could log in directly as root - you don't have to use sudo then.

 

Indeed, but then I lose all my configs: bash, vim, etc.

 

I've been plagued by this problem for months on my Ubuntu server, and I think I finally figured it out. Looking in the /etc/pam.d/ directory to see what happens when I try to sudo, I see that it calls a pam module called ecryptfs. I commented that line out, since I do not have any encrypted home directories. The problem seems to have disappeared.

Like several others before me, I have had trouble re-creating the problem on demand, since it seemed to delay the first time I sudo, but then it goes quickly for the next few hours. I managed to get the delay problem to occur repeatedly by doing "sudo -K" so it would "forget", and then my test, either "sudo -i" to get a shell or "time sudo pwd" to show me how much time it's taking (usually about 20 seconds).

I hope this points others in the right direction. I plan to submit this as a bug on the Ubuntu site, once I can figure out what category to put it in.

Alan Porter