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Re: Re: AOL's impatient servers

2004-06-25 07:07:28
On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 04:33:16 +0200, Frank Ellermann wrote
David Brodbeck wrote:

has anyone noticed that AOL's servers are awfully impatient?

Waiting 30 seconds before you're ready with your ident is
rather slow, and a busy mailer could try to use its limited
sockets as fast as possible.

Sorry, I should mention that the server that log entry is from isn't this one,
it's from the server I maintain at work.

However, you raise a good point...I think the problem is the ident query,
which takes 30 seconds to time out if you're blackholing packets to that port. 

Are you intentionally waiting so long ?  I'm just curious, bye.

No, not intentional in that case.  I do delay 40 seconds intentionally if the
IP is on a DNS blacklist or has no reverse DNS, but AOL's servers aren't
hitting that check.  I exempted them just to be sure.

I bet it's the ident query that's aggravating things.  I'll turn it off;
thanks for pointing that out.

Note, though, that the RFC specifically allows delaying the initial greeting.
 One site I'm aware of does this as a throttling technique when server load is
high.  So this may be causing problems elsewhere, too.