Packet dropping issue

[dbdataplus12]

I have an issue that's not directly Wingate related but I'm hoping that one or more Wingate savy people may know where to point me.

I have a long term installation of Wingate 5.2.2 installed on a Windows 2000 PC that was working fine for several YEARS. Then, one day the DSL provider (Verizon) sold their Hawaiian network to a local company (Hawaiian Telecom) and STARTING THE VERY DAY they assigned us a new IP address, we start having this repetitive problem: CONNECTIONS DROPPED.

What we know is as follows: Our internal mail server is very badly behaved and it attempts to send a 'no such addressee' message to every piece of spam it receives. This can amount to as many as 50 outgoing messages each time Wingate decides to 'send mail.' When this happens, it's possible and likely that ALL other connections to the Wingate machine are dropped.

Even though this started happening on the very day the DSL provider assigned us a new IP and network, they claim it's not THEIR issue. Recently, for other reasons, we moved our network AGAIN to another vendor and we're off the DSL and onto a partial T1 line.

But we have the same problem... SO the focus NOW is on either Windows 2000 or Wingate.

If I were to blindly guess at what's happening, it would be that 'someone' is dropping INCOMING connections in favor of the newer outgoing connections and then dropping the older outgoing connections in favor of newer ones.

I'm not sure that dropping older connections in favor of new ones might not be a rational plan for SOME implementations, but obviously I need for new connections to be refused when we reach whatever limit we're reaching.

Would anyone care to hazard a GUESS as to what's actually happening and where the underlying culprit is?

[adrien]

Hi

WinGate doesn't drop any connections to make way for new ones. If there is a licensing limit on the number of connections allowed, new connections are instead rejected, and there would be evidence of this. Also it shouldn't affect mail, since that is designed to retry anyway.

You can avoid the "no such recipient" mails, if you add the list of valid addresses to WinGate... er. you'd need to upgrade to 6.x to do this though. Then WinGate will simply reject the incoming mail for other addresses, and your internal mail server then won't even see them.

Adrien

[dbdataplus12]

10-4 on that Adrien,

I've been meaning to find a system on which to load Wingate 6. While som much of Wingate is incredibly intuitive, Email has almost been deliberately obtuse and I'm quite nervous that I could upgrade my production system and get Wingate 6 email working without at least a trial run.

Meanwhile, I never suspected that Wingate was my problem -- as you suggested, Wingate would do it differently -- but since Wingate is at the heart of so many network/proxy situations, I was wondering if anyone had any similar experience -- or even a guess.

[adrien]

Hi

Mail in WinGate 6 is quite different to WinGate 5.x, so it might be a plan to try it out first. We jump through a bunch of hoops to migrate settings, but since the structure is quite different, it's hard to get all scenarios.

Hopefully it's a bit less obtuse as well!

I'd be keen to hear any comments as well about what problems / issues people have with the mail configuration.

Adrien