[Off Topic] Clients still not connecting to the FreeBSD mail server

Andrew Falanga af300wsm at gmail.com
Wed Aug 6 02:00:32 UTC 2008


Hi,

Thanks again everyone for the pointers with Outlook and my fellow church 
parishoners.  I'm hoping for some more pointers.  Using tcpdump I'm fairly 
certain that the initial SYN packets from the clients are never reaching the 
server.  I'll need to test one more time to be sure (I wasn't 100% positive 
of the public IP address on the Internet side of the cable modem installed).  
Never the less, from home here I've verified what I should see if the initial 
SYN packets are received at the server and now know what to look for.  (Who 
knows, maybe the wireless router knows it's in a church and has decided no 
SYN's allowed.  Ok, that was bad.)

What I'm hoping to glean from the experts here is about wireless routers.  
I've never used them before, but one of the pastors was reasonably certain 
that the problems commenced for the one person who never had problems, the 
secretary, when she was switched from wired to wireless operations.  Sunday I 
was briefly able to see the administration pages of the wireless access 
point, however nothing seemed to jump off the page at me that, "Yeah, this is 
what's blocking them."  However, it definitely seems that something is 
preventing traffic over port 25 because we can all browse the Internet just 
fine.

I've verified the same timeout behavior with Outlook Express and Thunderbird.  
Using Thunderbird, I was able to check different settings too.  The settings 
should be to use authentication on the smtp server using SSL.  Someone, 
please educate me, does this mean that the authentication takes place over 
port 465 and the regular smtp still takes place over 25, or do both take 
place over 25?  I ask because KMail (my setup at home that works) says to use 
SSL, not TLS which uses port 465.  At the server, I use sockstat and see that 
on IPv4 sendmail has an open port on 465.

Thanks,
Andy


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