I am currently a Bellsouth DSL customer running linux. My setup is pretty simple. I have a WinTel WireSpeed eithernet DSL modem running into my linksys router, which handles the PPPoE connection and routes the DSL to both my computer and my roommates computer.

I used to be a DirectTV customer and I used the exact same setup, except I didn't have the linksys doing PPPoE because DirectTV DSL didn't use it. Also, I am running Slackware-current on my box, if that makes a difference to you.

My problem is this, if I ssh into my machine from any other bellsouth customer (including my office which uses BellSouth Business DSL) it works fine, no problems. If I ssh from anywhere else in the world the connection goes through and stays active for about 20s and locks up. This never happened when I was using DirectTV DSL.

I have run tcpdump on both sides and I can see them both trying to send packets to each other but eventually, although they are both sending out packets, they both stop recieving the others packets. This doesn't seam to ever happen when I connect from another bellsouth customer.

Anyone have any idea what the problem might be? I have contacted bellsouth several times but they usually end up just telling me to contact my OS vendor for support since Linux is unsupported. Anyone else ever have this problem? If so how did you fix it?

Thanks,
John

Interesting. Does this happen with any other service? If you have httpd running and you connect to your site from outside BellSouth will it lock up as well or is this issue exclusive to ssh?

Also, have a look at the log files to see if you can get any clues there. You may want to change the 'LOGLEVEL' variable in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file to get more information as to whats going on.

I probably should have shared that. It does do the same thing with http, ftp, and all other services. It is almost like the packets are getting routed poorly, I figured out that the firmware on the linksys has an update so I am going to do that and see what happens.

BTW, this is probably a really stupid question, but where does sshd log to? I see a few references in the syslog but they are only to errors that occured on boot when I had a bad seeing in my log file. Since going to DEBUG3 for logging I haven't seen any errors anywhere in /var/log (I grepped for it and it returned nothing).

According to the apache logs it sees my attempt to connect from the outside world:

128.61.104.78 - - [07/May/2003:15:51:09 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 2989

But I have no proof that it actually sent any data and the other machine just sits there at the "waiting for a responce" state. However when I use my machine at work you can see the initial GET along with page requests and the likes in the logs. Oh, and the page loads...

John

I think its /var/log/secure.

You certainly have a peculiar issue here. Let us know if the firmware upgrade does anything.

I did upgrade the firmware and then is started to work again.

Of course I also figured out why my logs weren't there, daemontools was eatting them, apparently it was very hungry, and apparntly I forgot to put a log directory in daemontools service directory for ssh.. opps.