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.
--
Jerry
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
- Alan Kay
