Wingate SMTP Server acting as a Gateway

[midnightbomber]

I have Wingate 5.0.10 running on Windows 2000 Server w/Sp4 using WGIC for clients, ENS for firewall services and SMTP Server as a gateway for an Exchange 2000 Server running on another Windows 2000 Server system also W/SP4.

The Wingate server occasionally stops responding to all requests and I have to restart it. I have automated the restart using a monitoring program which checks for internet connectivity through Wingate and will restart wingate using wingate.exe -stop and -start switches.

After the restart everything works fine except for the SMTP Server. It rejects all mail and I get a message 'Error 550: Unable to relay for this recepient' for all messages i try to send through the Exchange server or directly to the SMTP server in Wingate.

I have had this problem from version 5.01 and up to the current version 5.0.10. I have tried stopping and starting the SMTP server in wingate but the only things that seems to work is to restart the server where wingate is installed. i need a solution which does not require me to restart my internet access server everytime the wingate service stops.

[tim]

...After the restart everything works fine except for the SMTP Server. It rejects all mail and I get a message 'Error 550: Unable to relay for this recepient' for all messages i try to send through the Exchange server or directly to the SMTP server in Wingate.

Hmm, this is odd. Can you try something for me?

Try doing a manual stop start through the System tray icon, or the Windows service manager. Does the same thing happen?

Try opening Gatekeeper and manually clicking save changes.

The real issue is that the server becomes non-responsive... so is there anything in the logs to suggest what hepend immediatly before the lockup?

Turn on debug logging in the Advanced config, and then wait for the lockup to happen again.

How do the logs look now?

What WG services are active immediatly before the lockup?

Thanks

Tim

[midnightbomber]

When I first began experiencing the problem in version 5.01, I would stop and restart the wingate service from the taskbar icon. That didn't work so I later tried the net stop wingate/net start wingate commands which restarted the service but did not help the SMTP problem. My last option was the wingate -stop/-start command lines which didn't help either.
I have disabled the DHCP,DNS and POP3 Server Services. The DHCP would conflict with my internal DHCP server, I have a working Win2k DNS infrastructure in place and I don't need POP3 services. The only user service I have running are the FTP,POP3,SMTP,SOCKS and WWW proxies and the logfile service. I have also enabled debug logging on the WRS,SMTP Server,SMTP Proxy and WWW proxy as these are the services which process the most traffic. I noticed something unusual regarding the crashes. I increased the wingate cache size from 200MB to 500MB hoping to increase proxy performance for users and the crashing began occurring every two days instead of every day. I am not sure whether purging the cache has anything to do with the problem. Just an observation.

[midnightbomber]

I have found why the SMTP Service does not work after restarting wingate. I checked the listening ports/application opening them with X-netstat and found that wingate does not close/release port 25 when it locks up or when i stop the service. As a result the service creates a second listener on port 25 when wingate restarts. This resukts in two listeners to the same port 25. However, any request for a service on port 25 will automatically go to the first port in sequence which has no application attached to it since the wingate service attached to it had crashed. Now I need to find a way to close port 25 on Windows 2000 so the wingate service can reopen it correctly when it restarts.
I am still looking through the logs to figure out why it crashes in the first place.

[midnightbomber]

Any help with this problem would be welcome guys. The problem still persists. I have tried restarting the wingate service every night automatically but it will still lock up according to some undetermined schedule.

[tim]

I have found why the SMTP Service does not work after restarting wingate. I checked the listening ports/application opening them with X-netstat and found that wingate does not close/release port 25 when it locks up or when i stop the service. As a result the service creates a second listener on port 25 when wingate restarts. This resukts in two listeners to the same port 25. However, any request for a service on port 25 will automatically go to the first port in sequence which has no application attached to it since the wingate service attached to it had crashed. Now I need to find a way to close port 25 on Windows 2000 so the wingate service can reopen it correctly when it restarts.
I am still looking through the logs to figure out why it crashes in the first place.

Most odd. A port open after an application has been closed...

For a start, The Port List tool (included with NetPatrol) will allow you who owns a port, and kill the process that owns it.

If you install that utility, you may be able to discover who really has the port. I suspect that something else (IIS installs a smtp server by default) has the port.

The other thing do do is tick the 'Start even if address in use' option on the bindings tab. This should allow Wingate to get the port even if something else does have it.

Tim

[midnightbomber]

Thank sfor the info. I used the port monitor like your suggested. IIS SMTP service was interferring with wingate SMTP listener. I disabled the IIS SMTP service and the Wingate SMTP service seems to start up fine when I restart the wingate service. However, I am still experiencing the instability and lockups every few days. I have not been able to observe a patern to this behaviour though.

[tim]

Thank sfor the info. I used the port monitor like your suggested. IIS SMTP service was interferring with wingate SMTP listener. I disabled the IIS SMTP service and the Wingate SMTP service seems to start up fine when I restart the wingate service. However, I am still experiencing the instability and lockups every few days. I have not been able to observe a patern to this behaviour though.

OK, this must be a seperate issue. If you experience a instability, look through logs for that time and see if anything iunusual happened, eith in History or Logs, even syslog.

What other WinGate services are running?

Tim

[midnightbomber]

I have noticed something unusual about my wingate situation. I use the wingate client on all clients with integrated windows 2000 authentication. When it works, it works well. Right now I am online using this method and I have web access with no problems. However, no user can start a new session of the wingate client. It is refusing to authenticate any users. I had gatekeeper running and traffic seemed fine. I just logged out and I cannot get back in because of the authentication problem.

Also, should I list this as another post since this is not related to the SMTP problem which I orginally inquired about.

Thanks.

[adrien]

Is your guest account disabled? That may be causing problems with the initial connection.

Adrien

[midnightbomber]

Yes it is. That is the first account I check and disable on any NT/2000 based network I administer. About the services I have running:

User Services

FTP Proxy 21
Logfile server 8010
POP3 Proxy 110
SOCKS Proxy 1180 (specifically set at non-standard port)
SMTP Proxy 8025 (to avoid conflict with SMTP Server)
WWW Proxy 8080 (To avoid users configuring proxy settings)

System Services

Redirector 2080
GDP 368
Remote Control 808
SMTP Server 25

All other services are either disabled or not installed.