[TriLUG] accessing mail.trilug.org, port 993

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Alan Porter wrote:

> I noticed recently that I can not check my trilug mail from
> home, but I can from work ... However, the short-term solution that 
> worked... the swiss army
> knife of networking, SSH port forwarding.

When I first got your email I tested that I could connect to 
mail.trilug.org on port 993 from my location (as well as a few others), 
so indeed all is well on the TriLUG end.  If you haven't stumbled on the 
solution before I get around to it, I do intend to write up a short 
description that will help you to dramatically narrow things down, but 
time is really pressed as I've got a killer sore throat and numerous 
deadlines at the moment.  In short, use something like the tcpdump 
suggestions suggested by Brian Weaver:

>tcpdump -ni <interface> host mail.trilug.org and tcp port 993
>
Run that on both interfaces of your gateway machine and I suspect you'll 
discover that you do see the traffic on one interface, and then not on 
the other, indicating that the problem is with the firewall rules on the 
gateway in question.  Another valid test would be to see if you can 
connect to port 993 on another box that you know supports connections on 
that port.  You could use mail.joyner.ws as an arbitrary example.  The 
purpose of that test being to demonstrate that your ISP (or some other 
upstream provider) isn't filtering all traffic destined to port 993 on 
any host.  Also you could try connecting to mail.trilug.org on another 
port all together, for example 25.  This will help ensure that you're 
not improperly routing traffic for mail.trilug.org (via a bogus route, 
or some such).  Connecting to login.trilug.org (dargo) doesn't 
necessarily mean you're all set to connect to mail.trilug.org (moya) - 
generally it does, but you could certainly break one w/o the other w/ an 
unusual local configuration.  If you're still stumped, shoot another 
email to the list and I'll see if I can offer some other suggestions.  
Alternatively, if you're certain it's not your setup or your provider, I 
can try to setup a time in real-time with you to test w/ tcpdump on the 
TriLUG servers to see if we ever even see your traffic.  You could also 
pop into #trilug-sys on IRC and ask in there if anyone has time to 
troubleshoot it with you.

Best of luck,
Aaron S. Joyner
TriLUG Sys Admin

PS - looks like I made time to write up the short description.  :)