Hi List; First let me say that (1) I have a fairly unusual (I suspect) ssh setup, and (2) I hate the virus known as windows Here's the deal; The client I'm working for uses a SonicWall firewall to control access to the data centers. Unfortunately there are issues with the Linux openVPN clients (specifically open swan) where it connects but locks all other connections out of the firewall. So, until we figure this out the solution is to use the windows version of the SonicWall client. I've installed vmware and installed a copy of VirusXP (AKA Windows XP). I installed cygwin and followed the instructions here to install the ssh server: ( http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html ) although I did not run the mkpasswd and mkgroup commands, they seemed to break the install of ssh server. Anyway, I also setup an ssh key so I could login to the M of VirusXP without a password. Next I setup a config file in my Linux $HOME/.ssh dir with many entries like this (one for each host in the data ceners that I need to connect to): Host dataCenterHostname Hostname 10.1.x.x # data center I.P. HostKeyAlias 10.1.x.x # data center I.P. ProxyCommand /usr/local/bin/netcat-proxy-command 172.16.128.128 %h The 172.16.128.128 I.P. addr is the I.P. of the VirusXP image within vmware via nat. (I could not make the ssh connections work via bridged networking). The /usr/local/bin/netcat-proxy-command script is a netcat (nc) script and contains this: #!/bin/sh gateway=$1 internal=$2 ssh $gateway nc -w 1 $internal 22 To use this setup I boot up VirusXP, open the SonicWall VPN client and connect to one or more of the data centers. Then in Fedora 7 (the host OS) I open a terminal and run this: ssh dataCenterHostname so, to my issue. Most of the time this setup works fairly well, in that it does connect. It usually takes about 30 seconds for me to get a password prompt for the target data center host. This is acceptable but I think there's something weird going on that delay's the connection. I say this because I can open a cygwin windowin VirusXP and do an ssh <I.P.> and I get a password prompt immediately. The main issue is that several times a day the connections start to take several minutes to return the password prompt. I need to restart the cygwin service in VirusXP, and sometimes that doesn't help so I reboot the VM instance of VirusXP. This is quite frustrating, however I'm a DBA and have limited networking knowledge. Does anyone have any thoughts?, suggestions?, comments? Thanks in advance..