I have recently upgraded my HP Compaq nx9005 laptop from Slackware 10 to Ubuntu 5.04, mostly because I wanted a newer kernel to make the battery monitor etc. work correctly and 3d acceleration on the graphics card. It all seems to work fine except for email....

When I try to check for messages on my ISP's mail server using POP (via thunderbird, but I get the same result with kmail), the mail client just waits with a 'connecting to xxx' message. Eventually the message disappears, but there is no 'no new messages' displayed as would be expected if everything had worked. It is a bit unpredicatable - connections to some ISPs mail servers seem better than others. This at first appears to be a problem with the ISPs, but if I use my other computer, which is still running Slackware, mail works fine. I am confident that it is not the settings within thunderbird because I use a shared home directory on both computers, so the thunderbird configuration (and executable for that matter) is the same on both systems. At the moment I am running thunderbird remotely on my desktop machine and displaying it on the laptop as a workaround, but would like to make the laptop work too.

I am a bit out of ideas - I thought it might be a DNS problem, but I can ping and telnet into the mail servers ok. I also thought it might be a firewall on the kubuntu system, but as far as I can tell iptables does not have any rules set, so I do not think it is that. I suspect that this might not be a ubuntu problem because I have tried Fedora Core 3, and had the same problem - is it something to do with the 2.6.x kernel? With fedora I had another problem which was that access to normal web sites worked but secure ones did not. I have not noticed this with ubuntu.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, because I have run out of ideas and am starting to think I will have to go back to Slackware and build the new kernel and KDE from source myself - I thought changing to ubuntu was the easy way out for me!

Cheers


Graham.

It's been a bit - what have you tried since.

no rules? output of iptables -L says policy = ACCEPT everywhere and nothing in the chains? Otherwise, flush the lot and then see.

If it's intermittant, it's probably not iptables though.

With fedora, web issues are often cleared up by disabling IPv6.

You can log in to your ISP fine, the mail server IP in T-bird will pong your pings OK? (Check this by using the numbers.)

But when you try to fetch mail - it lingeres then vanishes? This is very obscure emergent behaviour ... Look to your logs -

Your ISP may be able to tell you what is happening from their end (do they get a mail request?)

Thanks for the suggestions, Simon,
iptables -L did just say ACCEPT everywhere, with nothing else, which I think means it is not doing anything.

I was able to telnet into the mail servers, so I must have been able to resolve the ip addresses from a shell. I did not manage to check it from thunderbird though - it is not forthcoming with error logs as far as I can tell.

I did notice another problem with ubuntu though which was that lpstat -a failed to find any of my printers (There should be two printers shared by cups).

I gave up at that point and decided that there must be something odd about the network configuration that I had not managed to find - I went for the brute force and ignorance approach and reinstalled Fedora 3. To my surprise it all seems to be working ok now (which is even odder because I had similar problems to the ubuntu ones with Fedora a few weeks ago).

Therefore, for all I have no worked out what the problem was, it has gone away.

Thank you for your help


Graham.

That's fine - Anaconda does lots of configuring for you which depend on what is running when you install. I had to re-install RH9 several times to get things going smoothly just because I'd rearranged some internal settings/cards. I could have tracked down the offending config and altered it of course.

Well done - it is better to start with little and obvious problems before you meet the subtle/weird ones.

iptables

Check your firewall again ... iptables -L ... hopefully it will have some settings in each chain.

There is a man page for iptables, which is usually impenitrable for folk unused to technical documents. (Please note, your profile says you use RH9 - you may want to add FC3 and Ubuntu in there too... My LQ > Edit Profile)

The default firewall is pretty good. There are many examples of others floating around. To start/stop the firewall do
/etc/init.d/iptables start (or stop)

It acts like a service, but it really isn't.