Strange connection

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 16:59, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> 
> > Port 113 is suppose to be used for ident services.  RFC 1413 provides
> > the details.  This should not be a problem, however your router should
> > stealth this port as well.  Have seen this before.  Depends on the
> > router implementation.  Not sure why they don't stealth that port as
> > well as all the others.
> 
> I can answer that. A *lot* of mail servers attempt to make an ident 
> request when you connect to send mail. If the port is stealthed, it can 
> cause the mail server to wait a very long time while the ident connection 
> attempt times out before continuing with the SMTP exchange. So many 
> firewalls leave port 113 unstealthed to keep that from happening. It is 
> stupid - but it is what you have to do work around brain-damaged SMTP 
> servers. It is worth noting that HTTP servers used to do the same stupid 
> thing - but everyone disabled it on the servers because it made web 
> browsing incredibly slow for a lot of people.

Thanks, that is good to know!  :)

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Hodie natus est radici frater.