Strange connection

[Benjamin Franz]

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