Slow connection to mail server

teeno · 12-05-2003, 05:43 AM

Hi All,

I am running Sendmail version 8.11.0 on a RedHat 7.0 box. For some reason the computers on my network running Windows XP Pro take a long time to login to their pop3 accounts. Once logged in they can download all email at the normal speed without problems.

I have lived with this problem for some time now but I would really like to get it fixed.

Any ideas?

Cheers.

Caba · 12-05-2003, 05:59 AM

a wild stab in the dark is that your pop daemon could well be trying to lookup the host names of the XP boxes. If there arn't any in your hosts file or DNS it may well wait for the query to timeout before it logs you in?

teeno · 12-05-2003, 06:07 AM

That is a very good point.

I will add some entries and see if that helps.

Thank you,

Pete

teeno · 12-05-2003, 09:17 AM

Nice idea but sadly that didn't work.

Any other ideas are very welcome.

By the way, I have now timed how long it takes to connect to the mail server and it is about 20 seconds.

Cheers,
Pete

Caba · 12-05-2003, 09:37 AM

The only other that comes to mid is very similar.
popd sends out an ident request and doesn't get an answer so is waiting for that to time out before it continues.
You could have alook see if there's an ident time out setting and set it to 1 second.

teeno · 12-10-2003, 05:08 AM

It's fixed!!!

Turns out it was a problem with the firewall on XP.

Thanks for the help.

Cheers,
Peter

teeno · 12-10-2003, 06:42 AM

I just found out the problem is the XP personal firewall is blocking all the ident request.

I have enter this rule on the mail server so that I can enable the Personal Filewall.

ipchains -I output -p tcp -j REJECT -s $EXTERNALIP -d 0.0.0.0/0 113

Can anyone see any problems with this rule.

Cheers,
Peter