Re: Outbox traffic jam?

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu, 28 June 16:42 Scott Thomason wrote:
| First...relax a little, I'm participating in this list from my daytime
| work account, but I'm having the problem on my home machine. So,
| there's a 12-24 hour lag between me saying something and getting a
| chance to report back with more info.

OK

| OK... I have completely resolved this issue by dumping the stock
| RedHat 7.1 kernel 2.4.2 (with over 100 patches applied by RH) and
| replacing it with my own, unpatched kernel 2.4.5 with only those items
| I need built in. So my mail goes out smoothly now, after about a 30
| second pause while Qmail hits port 113 and waits for a timeout.

RH 7.x strikes again.  I wonder which system call is broken?

| Regarding identd and MTA's. Yeah, they do try to hit the auth port to
| get the userid. Yeah, it's not very useful info, but they still try.

Regarding this one, it sucks and for no useful gain but at least
libESMTP can transfer multiple messages in a single SMTP session and
this feature can be used in Balsa.  Instead of hitting the send button,
select File/Queue.  After writing a few messages, select
File/Send Queued Mail in Balsa's main menu.  All the messages will
go in a single connection to the SMTP server.

I wasn't aware that Qmail used identd, and the qmail server I use
on occasion doesn't appear to do so.  Perhaps qmail's smtp server
is being started under inetd and the identd query is coming from
the tcp wrappers tcpd.  This would suggest wrong configuration at
the ISP (not unheard of).  I'll look over a few MTAs sometime and
see what they're trying to ascertain from identd.

| And the reason I made the comment about "screeching halt" is this: if
| your firewall simply drops a packet (as opposed to rejecting it with
| an icmp unreachable response), the MTA will wait for that auth
| connection for a long, long time on each connection. The mail would
| eventually go thru, but each message may experiece minutes-long
| delays, depending on your MTA and configuration. Scout's honor. Any
| serious text on firewalling deals with this topic.

I wasn't questioning firewall behaviour.

| ---scott
Brian