Re: Outbox traffic jam?

["Scott Thomason" <SThomaso hii com>]

First...relax a little, I'm participating in this list from my daytime work account, but I'm having the problem on my home machine. So, there's a 12-24 hour lag between me saying something and getting a chance to report back with more info.

OK... I have completely resolved this issue by dumping the stock RedHat 7.1 kernel 2.4.2 (with over 100 patches applied by RH) and replacing it with my own, unpatched kernel 2.4.5 with only those items I need built in. So my mail goes out smoothly now, after about a 30 second pause while Qmail hits port 113 and waits for a timeout.

Regarding identd and MTA's. Yeah, they do try to hit the auth port to get the userid. Yeah, it's not very useful info, but they still try. And the reason I made the comment about "screeching halt" is this: if your firewall simply drops a packet (as opposed to rejecting it with an icmp unreachable response), the MTA will wait for that auth connection for a long, long time on each connection. The mail would eventually go thru, but each message may experiece minutes-long delays, depending on your MTA and configuration. Scout's honor. Any serious text on firewalling deals with this topic.
---scott