Topic: connection not dropping

[Sasha Malic]

Using v4b3, the dial on demand works fine, but at times it wont drop the line.
I have timed it at longer than 15 minutes before manually turning off the modem.

The connect times are all set to short (verified)
There is no app on the network that is sending any external ip packets-
the connection stays up even if the PC's are all switched off.

However it is not consistently up. At times it will drop the connection as programmed.

Any ideas ??

Is there any special setting to allow Netmeeting to work through the e-smith
gateway. I cannot get the PC's on this network to connect to the MS$ server.
Is this port blocked on the server? (I believe that Netmeeting needs to have the IMAP
port opened, amongst others)


Thanks

[Sasha]

Correction - Not IMAP but LDAP port !

[Roald Opsahl]

Netmeeting (and other products) require more than IP masqerading to go through a 'firewall'. The problem is that not only the IP headers, but also fields inside the packets needs to be rewritten. To make it worse, the location of these fields varies with the contents of the packet. In short, in order to 'firewall' or proxy such protocols you need to have an implementation that fully understands the contents, it is not enough to just open one or more ports. As far as I know, this is beyond what e-smith currently can do (release 3).

In the general Linux community there are efforts under way to provide this service, I haven't followed this over the last few months so I'm not sure if this is ready for prime time and easily adaptable to the e-smith architechture. And admittedly, I haven't looked at e-smith 4 so I don't even know if that's included there.

[Charlie Brady]

Roald Opsahl wrote:

> Netmeeting (and other products) require more than IP
> masqerading to go through a 'firewall'. The problem is that not
> only the IP headers, but also fields inside the packets needs
> to be rewritten. To make it worse, the location of these fields
> varies with the contents of the packet. In short, in order to
> 'firewall' or proxy such protocols you need to have an
> implementation that fully understands the contents, it is not
> enough to just open one or more ports. As far as I know, this
> is beyond what e-smith currently can do (release 3).

Beyond what 4 will do as well.

There is an H323 proxy program which would be worth trying. It's called
PhonePatch and it's available from http://www.equival.com/. I've never
used it so I can't say how easy it would be to integrate into e-smith or
how well it works. Unfortunately it is payware as well (although it is from a company which does support open software - one of the founders of the OpenH323 project).

Charlie