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Date:      Tue, 10 Apr 2001 14:14:57 -0500
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
To:        Trevin Chow <tmchow@sfu.ca>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Firewall rules causing SSH disconects?
Message-ID:  <20010410141457.A8255@grumpy.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.30.0104092140290.3437-100000@fraser.sfu.ca>; from tmchow@sfu.ca on Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 09:43:01PM -0700
References:  <Pine.GSO.4.30.0104092140290.3437-100000@fraser.sfu.ca>

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On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 09:43:01PM -0700, Trevin Chow wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm just wondering what possible firewall rules (if any) could cause
> problems with random SSH disconnections. I'm trying to troubleshoot my
> situation here, and I'm unsure if it has to do with failing routers on the
> internet somewhere, or my own configuration.
> 
> The situatino is basically that I'm able to connect via SSH to my box
> remotely, but I'll get disconnected after a varying amount of time.
> 
> Is it possible that a firewall rule is causing this? I wouldn't think
> so..but I could be wrong.  Anyone else have any ideas about this? someone
> else mentioned to try turning "KeepAlive" to off to see what happens, but
> that didn't solve anything.

Ascend/Lucent Pipelines have a brain dead method of pruning their
connection state tables. The default is once every 24 hours but once the
max (~500) its terribly hard to get out because its not smart enough to
delete the oldest to make room for new. And it doesn't appear to be
smart enough to drop the state on close. We usually discovered this
limit in 12 to 18 hours of runtime so I set the purge at 2 hours. Works
for most everyone but if I don't keep my ssh link fairly busy the
connection is dropped by the firewall.

Then again this might have more to do with NAT in the Pipeline than
firewall altho the two are hard to tell apart.

So this might be what is happening to you too if there is a Lucent
SecureConnect Firewall between endpoints.

Playing with keep-state and check-state in ipfw I found the default
timer values to be way too fast. Only played with it for about an hour
but observed connection states were dropped when netstat said the socket
was still open, and my applications were crying because they too were
upset about their connections failing.

Maybe I wrote the ipfw rule(s) wrong. Used a simple "allow all outgoing
tcp connection from this host to any and keep-state". Maybe it was
keeping state of "connection in progress" when I intended only the act
of connecting was allowed to establish a pass rule between two hosts.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.

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