Name Resolution Problems

[palmermon]

Having some hideous problems since turning on the NAT routing and firewall.

Have been using Wingate for a long time for its WWW and socks proxy only. Recently got the email to upgrade to 5.2.2, so did.

Also have just installed Exchange behind wingate on another ADVSRV 2000. Needed NAT to work to send SMTP mail through the gateway (did this via IP address, to prevent need for name res on the server). Wanted to keep WWW proxying, because the Blacklist feature allows us to filter ads when browsing.

However, now, the WWW proxy randomly posts the following errors into its service log:

Error: Caught socket exception in CWWWSession::HTTPProcessRequest() Host name lookup for 'wwwi.reuters.com' failed - terminating

and all outbound web access is denied till i restart the service. I had tried using my inhouse DNS server as the daddy, using forwarding to the wingate box to resolve outside names. But this results in the inhouse DNS server making sometimes hundreds of requests out when this name res dropout occurs, which has on occasion blue screened the Wingate box and kills it. Seems that wingate can NEVER again resolve google.com, but when this happens everything is unresolved.

each box on the network uses the Wingate box as one of its preferred DNS servers, I have manually typed in the Internet DNS servers that wingate should use in its resolution settings too. The NAT log also has the following constant errors:

Debug: NAT error message code FFE0B40B, context 1417 OutICMP=0, InICMP=0, OutUDP=7769, InUDP=11366, OutTCP=1857034, InTcp=8667804
01/20/04 16:39:36 Debug: NAT error message code FFE0B40B, context 1425 OutICMP=3, InICMP=31536, OutUDP=0, InUDP=0, OutTCP=0, InTcp=0
01/20/04 16:39:36 Debug: NAT error message code FFE0B40D, context 1431 Total locked memory in use is 190326
01/20/04 16:39:36 Debug: NAT error message code FFE0B40E, context 1438 Unknown Frames = 0, Status Queue Size = 128

but the NAT router works fine.

Any help gladly appreciated. Also, using a straight thru connection through the ISP never drops out at all.

[palmermon]

Box is a Win2000 Srv, SP4, Trmsrvs, RRAS (inbound modem connection only), running nothing else but an exchange POP3 connector manually configured to dial on the Single ISDN connection.

plenty of memory, slow processor, but well within limits.

Thanks...

[palmermon]

too late, shes gone, RRAS NAT is simply better and actually works, shame

[adrien]

HI

Those ENS errors are not actually errors, they are informational logs showing kernel memory usage. Really must change the log entry for that.

As for having WinGate use an internal server for DNS which in turn uses WinGate for DNS, this creates an immediate DNS loop, which will cause you serious problems, since the 2 machines will sit there all day asking each other the same questions over and over.

THe best way to ensure that WinGate DNS will work is to have only one DNS server specified in the OS - one on an ISP that actually works. Or you can manually specify a DNS server to use in the WinGate DNS resolver configuration in WinGate.

Adrien