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Date: 12 Aug 1995 23:22:51 +0800
From: peter@haywire.dialix.com (Peter Wemm)
Message-ID: <40ih0b$i0m$1@haywire.DIALix.COM>
Organization: DIALix Services, Perth, Australia.
References: <199508120026.TAA06139@vellocet.insync.net>
Subject: Re: Sendmail weirdness.....
Sender: questions-owner@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

rberndt@nething.com (Randy Berndt) writes:

>Having a strange problem with sendmail.

>Configuration:

>486/66 running 2.0.5-RELEASE (hostname: kilgour)
>   iijppp connection to ISP
>   ed1 connection to ethernet

>on net are 2 pc's running lantasti tcp/ip and one mac (running mactcp)

>If I telnet to kilgour port 25 from the mac, it comes right up. If I send
>mail from the mac, it works fine.

>If I telnet from either pc, it just hangs for about 1 minute (maybe more).
>'ps ax' shows a sendmail process in "startup from ...pc...". After a while,
>I get the sendmail banner.

>Eudora on the mac sends fine, eudora on the pc doesn't work. Setting my smtp
>on the pc to my ISP ---DOES--- work.

>ping, telnet (regular to 23) work on the pc's just fine. Telnetting to my
>ISP port 25 works fine.

>This has me TOTALLY stumped.....

>Thanks for any help.

>Randy

It sounds like your pc's have a broken tcp/ip stack that is not
correctly refusing the ident connection that sendmail is making when
you connect to the port.  It looks like your ISP doesn't do ident lookups.

The RFC931 timeout was set "not too long to cause serious problems,
but long enough to annoy the hell out of pc users with broken stacks,
so as to `encourage' them to bug their vendor for a fix".   I dont
recall who said that, it might have been Eric Allman (author of
sendmail), but I do NOT know for sure..

If this is causing you serious hardship, you can disable the ident
lookup when you compile sendmail.   Look at about line 995 of
/usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail/src/conf.h - change the IDENTPROTO value to
"0" and see if that helps.

You really should bug your PC tcpip stack vendor - you are going to
see more and more of this problem in the future, as ident becomes more
and more widespread.

-Peter