hello all,

i've been struggling with email for a day now.  for reasons i won't
go into because i don't control the box, the DSL network i'm on
had wingate installed at the gateway box.  right around then
email started failing.  i run my own SMTP server on this notebook
and it delivers mail directly (since i'm travelling and i use 
different internet providers depending on the day of the week).  

i couldn't send email directly, nor could i send it with a
smart host (i modified the smart host's config temporarily just 
to let me in, this is one of my own boxes).  at that point i 
thought maybe the ISP i was going through was filtering SMTP 
traffic (except it was a weird kind of filtering since the 
connection would go through, but it would time out and not 
complete). so i tried an ssh tunnel and had SMTP go through 
that. still no joy.  so it wasn't ISP filtering.

then i saw the following post (actually, i saw the post he 
was answering, and i followed the link to this post).

http://msgs.securepoint.com/cgi-bin/get/postfix9904/37/1.html

the man is a genius, on very little data, he diagnosed the problem
and he diagnosed it exactly right.  better than that, he diagnosed
it for the other guy, and he saw the future and diagnosed my exact
same problem! 

hehe, i don't know anyone who would even have looked where he 
looked.  heck, truth to tell, this is the first time i'd even
HEARD of MTU Discovery.  i've worked with wingate before, but
we'd not seen this problem since bandwidth was always scarce
and MTUs were small.

i don't have the time to monkey with the kernel, or recompile
it, or find out here to disable MTU discovery in /proc and i
can't find where in wingate to set it (i suspect it can't be
done), so i just set the mtu to a small, inefficient, but
wingate-tolerant value via "ifconfig mtu xxx".

it's a good read. and short.  recommended.

tiger

-- 
Gerald Timothy Quimpo  tiger*quimpo*org/gquimpo*sni*ph/tiger*sni*ph

      The more you complain, the longer God lets you live.

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