lepreau@utah-cs.UUCP (Jay Lepreau) (09/30/88)
Edward Vielmetti writes:
from the ping data, which shows lots of dropped
packets and widely variable times (from 1000 ms to 13000 ms) and
occasional 'network unreachable' errors, I'd conclude that the
poor arpanet imp at the center for seisic studies is completely
saturated, and it's dropping packets left and right.
I'd appreciate it if someone closer to the action bore this
out.
We have the same problem and at first I suspected the same cause but
it's definitely not that. We had similar horrible ping times, until
I changed our routing tables to route to uunet directly through our
attached Arpanet interface, and have had consistent ping times of about
600ms. However, we still can't complete a connection to port 25, but
can to other ports. Mail sent in a loop thru other seismo sites and
then thru uunet back to us does get through. So there is some
interaction between the network or client host name and the sendmail
server. I've tried from elsewhere on the net also, to no avail.
We've tried to contact Rick Adams but he's away (probably at Interop)
and know of no other phone numbers. This is a big problem and a Bad
Thing. I have started other phone tracers which may come through
today. Guess will start packet tracing if things don't get better
soon. Rich Salz, I dunno why you insist on being so coy about who
runs things at uunet when there's a legitimate problem like this.
Meanwhile, the network has tons of mail being sent back to users since
this has now been going on for more than 3 days.
Jay Lepreaursalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) (10/01/88)
In <5756@utah-cs.UUCP>, lepreau@cs.utah.edu (Jay Lepreau) writes: > Rich Salz, I dunno why you insist on being so coy about who >runs things at uunet when there's a legitimate problem like this. I don't publish people's phone numbers without their prior permission. SRI-NIC lists Rick Adams as the contact person, along with a phone. If you have the problem of not being able to maintain SMTP connections, then you have the means to work on a solution -- the NIC whois database... -- Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net.
rick@SEISMO.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (10/04/88)
As well as I can determine, the problem results from bad routes resulting in extraordinary round trip times. The uunet computer was up and happy. There are several people claiming that someone is turning on packet filtering on some of the mail bridges and screwing up the SMTP traffic. I have no data for or against that argument, so we can treat it as an ugly rumor. (But it certainly would explain things!) If anyone has a spare 1822 board for a Protoen gateway that they would like to lend us for a few months, it would make things easier... As it is, we are forced to continue limping along with running BRL's gateway software on a PDP-11/44 with an LH/DH-11. In the long run, we are scheduled to be connected to NSFNet (SURANET) late this year. As far as routing goes, based on some stories I've heard, I'm not sure if that will be an improvement or not! ---rick