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Re: Weird connection problem - Netfilter?

Subject: Re: Weird connection problem - Netfilter?
From: Andrew Greenburg
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 15:26:00 -0500
At 09:12 PM 4/30/2002 +0100, you wrote:
On Tuesday 30 April 2002 8:58 pm, Andrew Greenburg wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been using an iptables-based firewall at the office for several
> months, and all of a sudden today I started having problems with opening
> network connections to UNIX hosts. The port opens, and then it sits there
> for about 60 seconds before it actually responds. After that, the
> connection works normally. My tcp/ip connections to NT-based servers work
> fine. There have been absolutely no changes to the configuration of the
> netfilter box.
>
> Any ideas?

Whenever I hear this sort of problem, I normally say "ident lookup".

I guess in your case (since you've had a working netfilter box for some
months with no recent changes), the question has to be - are the Unix boxes
ones which you;ve previously connected to without these delays, and have
there been any changes to those servers ?   (Specifically, has anyone
installed TCP-wrappers on them ?)

Yes, these are Unix boxes that I've always connected to in the past without delay, and there haven't been any changes to them. I have noticed that when I attempt to ftp into the one of them that I administer, I see this in the log:

ftpd[1394]: getpeername (in.ftpd): Transport endpoint is not connected

To investigate the problem, it might be a good idea to put a logging rule on
your firewall (in the INPUT chain if you;re masquerading the clients behind
the firewall's own IP address; in the FORWARD chain if you're not) to see if
you;re getting any packets destined for TCP port 113 - the ident daemon.

I've checked this, and I'm not seeing any packets destined for TCP port 113. I'm fairly positive that in the past I used to see these packets.

If you don't want to change the firewall, put a packet sniffer on the outside
(ethereal would do nicely) and see if you're getting ident requests back from
the servers with the delays.

I think this is the next step.


--
 Andrew M. Greenburg                   |   agreenbu   @  in-span   .   net
 Systems Engineer                      |   (317)234-1001     (317)234-1328
 Indiana Web Academy                   |   Phone             Fax



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