I reinstalled my trusty workhorse 13″ Macbook Pro recently (some buggy kernel extensions got the better of it).

Once I got the OS up and running again and data restored from backup, all ssh server connects from the Terminal had a 20 second delay upon initial connect.

Hmm – appareantly I had forgotten to backup some customization tricks from my last ssh config!

Putting the below lines in my ~/.ssh/config fixed the annoying connect delay:

Host *
GSSAPIAuthentication no
GSSAPIKeyExchange no
AddressFamily inet


I only use SSH private/public keys to authenticate to my remote servers, so no GSSAPI extensions were needed, the last line keeps the OpenSSH client from attempting a IPv6 connection to the remote host.

Heureka – no more delay and happy ssh’ing once again!