Hey guys,

Here's a weird problem: whenever I try to connect to my university servers -- ssh, IMAP, webmail, or even my department's main webpage in a browser (some other dept pages are okay) -- I can connect but the connection dies very soon.

So if I ssh univ.edu, I can work for about ten seconds and then it hangs. I have about 100 emails in that account so less /var/mail/user reliably hangs. IMAP downloads, webmail, etc. don't work. This is all only my university's site; I can browse newspapers or linuxquestions, ssh to a friend's machine, etc. with no problems.

And this is all with a custom 2.6 kernel (parts of config attached below). When I boot with any distro's generic kernel this doesn't happen.

I will of course rebuild my kernel, but I'm kinda curious as to what the problem is.

Thanks.


Here's the output from egrep "CONFIG_IP|CONFIG_NET" .config:
CONFIG_NET=y
CONFIG_NETLINK_DEV=y
CONFIG_NET_KEY=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTICAST=y
CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER=y
CONFIG_IP_MULTIPLE_TABLES=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_FWMARK=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_NAT=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_TOS=y
CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_VERBOSE=y
# CONFIG_IP_PNP is not set
CONFIG_NET_IPIP=m
CONFIG_NET_IPGRE=m
CONFIG_NET_IPGRE_BROADCAST=y
CONFIG_IP_MROUTE=y
CONFIG_IP_PIMSM_V1=y
CONFIG_IP_PIMSM_V2=y
# CONFIG_IP_VS is not set
CONFIG_IPV6=m
CONFIG_IPV6_PRIVACY=y
CONFIG_IPV6_TUNNEL=m
CONFIG_NETFILTER=y
# CONFIG_NETFILTER_DEBUG is not set
CONFIG_IP_NF_CONNTRACK=y
# CONFIG_IP_NF_FTP is not set
# CONFIG_IP_NF_IRC is not set
# CONFIG_IP_NF_TFTP is not set
# CONFIG_IP_NF_AMANDA is not set
# CONFIG_IP_NF_QUEUE is not set
CONFIG_IP_NF_IPTABLES=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_LIMIT=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_IPRANGE=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_MAC=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_PKTTYPE=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_MARK=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_MULTIPORT=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_TOS=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_RECENT=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_ECN=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_DSCP=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_AH_ESP=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_LENGTH=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_TTL=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_TCPMSS=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_HELPER=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_STATE=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_CONNTRACK=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_OWNER=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_FILTER=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_REJECT=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_NAT=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_NAT_NEEDED=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_MASQUERADE=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_REDIRECT=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_NETMAP=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_SAME=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_NAT_LOCAL=y
CONFIG_IP_NF_NAT_SNMP_BASIC=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MANGLE=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_TOS=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_ECN=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_DSCP=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_MARK=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_CLASSIFY=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_LOG=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_ULOG=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_TCPMSS=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_ARPTABLES=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_ARPFILTER=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_ARP_MANGLE=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_TARGET_NOTRACK=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_RAW=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_ADDRTYPE=m
CONFIG_IP_NF_MATCH_REALM=m
# CONFIG_IP6_NF_QUEUE is not set
CONFIG_IP6_NF_IPTABLES=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_LIMIT=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_MAC=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_RT=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_OPTS=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_FRAG=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_HL=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_MULTIPORT=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_OWNER=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_MARK=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_IPV6HEADER=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_AHESP=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_LENGTH=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MATCH_EUI64=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_FILTER=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_TARGET_LOG=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_MANGLE=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_TARGET_MARK=m
CONFIG_IP6_NF_RAW=m
CONFIG_IP_SCTP=m
# CONFIG_IPX is not set
# CONFIG_NET_DIVERT is not set
# CONFIG_NET_HW_FLOWCONTROL is not set
# CONFIG_NET_SCHED is not set
CONFIG_NET_CLS_ROUTE=y
# CONFIG_NET_PKTGEN is not set
# CONFIG_NETPOLL is not set
# CONFIG_NET_POLL_CONTROLLER is not set
CONFIG_NETDEVICES=y
# CONFIG_NET_SB1000 is not set
CONFIG_NET_ETHERNET=y
# CONFIG_NET_VENDOR_3COM is not set
# CONFIG_NET_VENDOR_SMC is not set
# CONFIG_NET_VENDOR_RACAL is not set
# CONFIG_NET_TULIP is not set
# CONFIG_NET_ISA is not set
CONFIG_NET_PCI=y
# CONFIG_NET_POCKET is not set
# CONFIG_NET_RADIO is not set
# CONFIG_NET_FC is not set
# CONFIG_NETCONSOLE is not set
# CONFIG_IPMI_HANDLER is not set

This is a bigger problem than I thought. Not all generic kernels work.

- Slackware 10.0's generic 2.4 kernel works
- SuSE 9.1's generic 2.6 kernel works

Fedora's 2.6, Gentoo's 2.6, and the kernels I built don't work. This is a bit of a pain because I use FC2, so now I can boot with SuSE's kernel but I can't make any changes or upgrades!

Help, please!

Again, the problem is as follows:

• kmail or mozilla mail are able to find my university's IMAP server; they both ask me for a password, get the folder lists right, but then they're unable to actually get the messages.
• ssh is able to connect me to the university server, but hangs after about ten seconds.
• I can ssh to some other machine (friend's machine or my Slack server with 2.4 kernel) and from there I can ssh to the univ server just fine.

Thanks.