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Re: [FW-1] SMTP and Unknown Established TCP packet



That depends really. If you drop ident, inbound mail delivery takes a bit
longer.
If you reject, then the process mail delivery is sped up.
BUT *something* will respond when a script-kiddie scans you boxes. It gives
away a tiny piece of information in such a way that suggests "Firewall at IP
a.b.c.d".
Certainly something *I* would use when performing legitimate scans..!

Tom

-----------------------------------
Tom Rowan
Security Alchemy Ltd.
-----------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: Elisabeth Wonders [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 27 March 2002 17:03
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FW-1] SMTP and Unknown Established TCP packet


Is this a situation in which "reject" is preferable over "drop"?   I'm
dropping ident traffic as part of my catch-all rule.

Elisabeth




                      Don <[email protected]>
                      Sent by: Mailing list for                  To:
[email protected]
                      discussion of Firewall-1                   cc:
                      <[email protected]        Subject:
Re: [FW-1] SMTP and Unknown Established TCP packet
                      kpoint.com>


                      03/27/2002 09:58 AM
                      Please respond to Mailing list for
                      discussion of Firewall-1






> We found out that SMTP connections to many sites took *long* times to
> establish. We demonstrated that in that particular case the problem
> was lousy service from the ISP, since many sites had problems when
connections
> were attempted. Connections were being dropped (out of state) since it
took
> longer than the "handshake" timeout to start exchanging traffic. We
> worked-around it taking the 60s default timer to 300s, and advised the
> customer to talk to their service provider.

The problems being described here sound exactly like an ident timeout is
causing the problem. Please make sure that you are _rejecting_ ident traffic
to your mail server. If not, some remote systems attempt to perform an ident
lookup, and that reverse connection is dropped by your firewall. By the time
that ident connection times out, and the mail server goes back to the SMTP
session, the connection has also timed out.

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