Did someone reload the internet from floppy last night?

[Steven W. Orr]

On Tuesday, Feb 3rd 2004 at 13:51 -0500, quoth Kevin D. Clark:

=>
=>Steven W. Orr writes:
=>
=>> When others were getting connection refused, they were not even getting to 
=>> my computer. It was not my server or firewall. The question is this: Is 
=>> there a traceroute command that will tell me *where* along the way that 
=>> the connection *was* getting refused.
=>
=>What does 'tcpdump host my-computer tcp port 25 or ip proto icmp"
=>produce when run on or near the computer that is trying to connect to
=>"my-computer"?
=>
=>If you don't run this or the moral equivalent to this, it's going to
=>be difficult to diagnose your problem.
=>
=>--kevin

The problem ended at about 10:30 last night and started at about 5:30PM.  
So my morality is certainly to remain questioned. :-) But what I'm trying
to figure out for the future still remains: If in the future, an outside
person tries to send me mail and gets connection refused, how can I run
something which will tell me where along the way the connection was
getting refused?

At the time that I wanted to ask this question, I was able to both ping 
and traceroute to myself from the outside. It was the refusal on my port 
25 that was the problem. RCN was claiming that they were not blocking my 
25 and I didn't believe them, but I had no way to prove otherwise. That's 
why I'm looking for a way to see all the hops along the way but confined 
to TCP on 25. If the internet was hosed over because of a big backbone 
bankruptcy, and someone else was blocking my 25, that's different than if 
RCN was doing it.

Also, while this was going on, there were a number of other SMTP servers 
outside of RCN which would not respond to me when I tried to telnet out to 
them.

-- 
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have  .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net