[H-GEN] Strangeness with POP3
Russell Stuart
russell at stuart.wattle.id.au
Tue Feb 18 02:47:23 EST 2003
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One possibility is that it is doing a ident lookup - which is failing.
The other is reverse DNS. An easy way to check for ident to use
"netstat -anp -A inet" during the pause and see what ports the pop3
server has open. The only way I can think of for checking for a reverse
DNS lookup is to use tcpdump.
On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 16:16, Ewan Edwards wrote:
> I haven't been able to figure out what is (not) going on here.
>
> I have a RH7.3 box set up as a mail server. The MTA is Postfix 1.1.7 and all
> the clients are serviced by imap and ipop3 daemons from the imap-2001a
> package. This mail server was brought on line two days ago when the Postfix
> and Mailman configuration was migrated from another RH7.3 box. Also migrated
> were local user accounts, mail spool directory, and mail lists archives.
>
> Everything seems to be working correctly except for a delay for pop clients.
> It appears there's a delay[1] happening between when xinetd launches a new
> instance of ipop3d and when the pop3 daemon exits. There wasn't any delay
> noticed on the previous box.
>
> When I started looking in the logs (in particular /var/log/maillog), I didn't
> see anything unusual until I noticed that the time on both /var/log/maillog
> and /var/log/secure was always the current time[2]. At that point I decided
> to tail -f both of them side by side and watch what happened when pop clients
> connected. That's how I found the where the delay is happening.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't know enough about what is supposed to be happening to
> know where to go from here. After doing a bit of googling, my best guess is
> that its something to do with pam and authenticating each pop client
> connection. Can anyone give me some clues or hints about where to look from
> here - please.
>
>
> [1] The delay is between 16s and 21s. See extract from /var/log/secure
> attached.
> [2] Now that I think about it, this is probably to be expected with any
> reasonable number of mail users.
>
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