OK, I should be able to get myself out of this one, since I got myself into it, but then I wouldn't be a newbie...

I have a machine running Redhat 7.1, Sendmail 8.11.2, and the imap/pop server that comes with RH 7.1 (2001-a10). I have also been setting up portsentry with iptables for intrusion detection.

I'm now in a situation where attempts to connect to either Sendmail (port 25) or the pop server succeed, but only after a 20 second delay. It's exactly 20 seconds, as measured by a packet sniffer, and it's extremely repeatable (that is, it always happens). It seems like I've got a server blocked somewhere in all the portsentry stuff and that some process somewhere is waiting for something to time out. But I've shut off portsentry, cleared hosts.accept and hosts.deny, flushed my iptables (in an attempt to remove any traces of firewalling), and rebooted, and the problem remains. Grr.

Does anybody have any clues? Is there some firewall stuff still hanging around that I've missed? I've googled up a couple of webpages talking about the pop server can get hung up when a port 113 AUTH request, issued as part of the POP request, fails and has to time out. But then I thought I had turned all the firewall stuff off....

Thanks,
Jim Miller