[lug] Weird mail/firewall problem

[Hugh Brown]

Something that can be informative is to go to an outside host and telnet
to your port 25 and do a session by hand and watch for errors.

Hugh


On Tue, 2002-02-12 at 21:14, Chip Atkinson wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm having some weird stuff going on with my mail and perhaps the
> firewall and am wondering if anyone could shed some light on the problem
> I'd appreciate it.
> 
> In my maillog, I'm seeing entries like this:
> 
> Feb 12 19:06:14 poodle sendmail[22496]: SAA22496: timeout waiting for
> input from femail17.sdc1.sfba.home.com during message collect
> 
> In my messages file I'm seeing entries like this:
> 
> Feb 12 19:05:28 poodle kernel: Packet log: input DENY ppp0 PROTO=6
> 24.254.60.38:65535 63.173.117.115:65535 L=492 S=0x00 I=7422 F=0x2042 T=245
> (#12)
> 
> Then I nslookup  24.254.60.38
> 
> Server:  ns1.rmpg.org
> Address:  63.225.119.189
> 
> Name:    femail44.sdc1.sfba.home.com
> Address:  24.254.60.38
> 
> Huh?  It seems that the email timeouts are related to these denied
> packets.  The weird thing is that the port is 65535, not 25.
> 
> I see these denial messages scrolling by almost as fast as the messages in
> the maillog.
> 
> I'm a bit puzzled and don't want to open up myself unnecessarily, but it
> slmost seems that I'm blocking mail throughput.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Chip