Xref: utzoo comp.mail.sendmail:134 comp.protocols.tcp-ip:4770
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!ncar!mailrus!utah-gr!utah-cs!lepreau
From: lepreau@utah-cs.UUCP (Jay Lepreau)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: uunet catch-22: help!
Summary: Rick Adams come back!
Message-ID: <5756@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 88 11:17:49 GMT
References: <25193@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> <10551@bellcore.bellcore.com> <719@mailrus.cc.umich.edu>
Reply-To: lepreau@cs.utah.edu (Jay Lepreau)
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 29
Cc: donn, emv@mailrus.cc.umich.edu
Bcc: j

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 Lepreau