Good afternoon everyone, a relatively new Linux user here....

I have a problem setting up a network at home. I had an old PC so installed Fedora 7 on it from a magazine CD and it is up and running fine. I connected it to the network at home OK and can see it and its contents via SAMBA no problems at all. I installed SQUID and can run it as a proxy and share the ADSL internet connection with no problems. There are a number of windows machines on the network that have no problems using files, printing or using the ADSL to surf the internet via SQUID.

Then I run into a problem when attempting to connect to email on the windows Outlook clients. (they can surf the net with no problems)

The outlook client tells me that I cannot find the server that the email is stored on and gives an error (0x80040900).

When I connect the ADSL direct to the network card on that computer I can connect, send and receive email with no problems. When I connect to and use the network to ADSL via the Linux box, I get the error.

The system spec is Linux Box has two ethernet cards eth0 and eth1 - one is connected to the internet and one is connected to the network. The one that is connected to the net has an IP address of 10.1.1.3 and obtains it via DHCP from the ADSL modem. I can surf the net no problems with this configuration. The other network card has a static IP address of 192.168.0.2 (this is so the SQUID proxy can run an be seen via the clients on the network).

The Windows client(s) is/are XP & Vista running Nortons as a personal firewall. (as I said previously when I connect the ADSL to the Windows machine directly, there is no problems accessing email)

The internal IP addresses are obtained via DHCP and run in the 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.0.15 range.

I have added masquerading and IMAP and pop3 forwarding to the iptables script and turned on IP forwarding in syscontl.conf

Any suggestions on what may be wrong or how I can get the email to connect?

Tinkicka

Before all else, you should realise that you are using a very old version of Fedora. I think the current version is 11 and I doubt that 7 is still being supported. Things might go much better if you were using Fedora 11. I'd burn a CD and install that and then try again with your mail server.
Cheers,
jdk

What happens if you disable norton firewall?

Tinkicka, welcome to LQ.

Great job you've done so far. Glad to hear you're succeeding with linux. You need to do a few more tests. Try to ping the mail server from the machine that won't connect: like so: ping mailserver, where mailserver is the pop or smtp server you use. Try both. You should get a response.

Now your iptables firewall might be a little messed up. You need to allow the proper traffic, in both directions. You iptables set-up might not be as transparent as you think. If you want to use linux as a firewall, DHCP server, router and what not, you're going to be there for a long time trying to get the set-up as good as something like SmoothWall 3.0 Polar, which is a preconfigured firewall distro, with a remote gui interface, so you can administer it in a web browser, on a remote machine, even a Windows machine.

It takes about 15 minutes to install and configure SmoothWall, and it isn't a machine hog like Fedora. Then you've got iptables all set up, and some nice stuff, like snort, and complete logging, where you can block based on log entries, with a mouse click.

All the standard user ports are enabled by default: DNS, http, ftp, pop, smtp. In any event, you probably are blocking the port/protocol for email, while allowing http. So, the web works, but not email. I think pop is port 113, and smtp is port 25, but you'll need to verify that with google.com .

Hi,

thanks for the replys thus far.....

In answer to them,

I have turned off Nortons but there is no change.

I can ping from the Linux machine to the internet and receive replies within specs for ping. I cannot ping from the windows machine to the internet as it replies "destination host unreachable".

Does this give you any further clues???


[rant]
I do not want to set up the machine as a sole firewall, as I am getting rather tired of MS and the costs involved in just trying to keep up with new software. In a few years I am going to retire and the costs involved with MS will mean that I will NOT be updating their software as it is not in the budget, hence the need to have a fully functioning Linux machine to play with so that I can migrate across and not have any problems or an empty bank balance. [/end rant]

Tinkicka

Can you post the SQUID conf and
iptables -L

Hi,

thanks for the help thus far.....

because of this line in a previous reply I did a little research and a quick tutorial on Iptables and discovered that they were messed up alright....I changed the order around according to what I found in a book and low and behold, I can now access the email server, but only via hardwired network connections only!!!!! Trying to do the same with wireless connections will not let me through. I am fortunate that the house is completely hardwired for networks but not being able to connect via the wireless access point is a problem (moreso for the wife as she works all around the house on her laptop)......

It is not in the Linux box but rather it is a standalone access box. All the same conditions as before apply - I can surf the net wirelessly with no problems and actually the wireless box is the DHCP server for the network......any suggestions on where this may have gone wrong, or do I just keep on tinkering.........

Tinkicka