Hi all, I hope somebody can help me with the following problem -- sorry for the lengthy explanation. I have a machine running SUSE 9.2 Pro in a large research lab. It has a unique IP address, but is not directly accessible from the outside world through the lab's firewall. Instead, the lab offers SSH gateways (running Debian 3.1) to which you can log in from outside, and from there you can ssh to machines in the lab. This is as much as I know about the lab's network structure. My machine also serves as a gateway between a small private subnet and the research lab network. Now I have the problem that if I want to log onto my machine from the lab's SSH gateway, it takes 30 seconds for the SSH server to respond and prompt for the password, which is quite annoying. If I log on from the private subnet, I get the password prompt immediately. If I log on from inside the lab's network, I get the immediate response as well. If I ping my machine from the SSH gateway, I get an immediate response. If I try to log onto a different Linux machine inside the lab's network from the SSH gateway (Redhat 7.3), I get an immediate response. So it looks like it's something between my machine's SSH server and the SSH gateway's SSH client. The problem is independent of the machine's firewall settings (the same with the SUSE firewall on or off). One hint might be that: If I log onto any other Linux machine from my Windows laptop (SSH Secure Shell 3.2.9), I get a popup window with a prompt saying "Enter Password". I type my password, and I'm there. For that SUSE machine though, I get a popup saying "Enter your authentication response" and a password field. I enter the password, and then another window pops up again saying "Enter your authentication response", and OK and cancel buttons. I first have to click OK, then I'm logged on. So maybe the server expects a different authentication mechanism and falls back to password after a while? But why does the login go quickly then from any machine other than the SSH gateway? Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks, Benjamin