[ale] Please help: BellSouth ADSL hangs with sendmail and up2date

[Chuck Mattern]

OK folks I'm back from testing all of the suggestions offered earlier in the
thread and still stumped.  I feel strongly that my problem is related to Bell
South and not my configuration, of course omniscience is not among my
characteristics and finding out that I am wrong but having a solution would be
great.  And of course getting any assistance from BellSouth with Linux box on
my end will be difficult at best.

To recap, the scenario is that I am attempting to switch from AT&T Broadband 
to BellSouth DSL.  I have both connections up in tandem but this is getting 
expensive for a poor sysadmin.  Both connections work very well EXCEPT that 
both up2date and sendmail connections on the BellSouth link will establish and 
then hang.  There are copious screen scrapes and diagnostic outputs in the 
first message of this thread which I can repost if needed.

At this point I have tried setting up the following configs on the BellSouth 
side:

RedHat 6.2 with and without an ipchains firewall.
RedHat 7.3 with and without an iptables firewall.
IPCop 0.1.1p6, manually updated to the latest Roaring Penguin 
PPPoE

All of these have the same symptom, up2date and sendmail outbound connections
will establish and then hang from any machine inside the network (yes I have
been modifying my sendmail.cf to match the targeted provider and restarting
sendmail to read in the altered config).  up2date run on the RedHat firewall
boxes themselves will hang.  When I try up2date with the firewall directives
down down it still hangs.  If I set the default route of the BellSouth firewall
to point through the AT&T firewall and re-issue the up2date it runs flawlessly.

On the AT&T side I had an OBSD firewall but to better trouble shoot this I did 
a matching install of IPCop 0.1.1p6 with identical configs (which is still 
running and has been flawlessly for a week now) problems stay with the 
BellSouth side.  Something is up with either the DSL modem (Alcatel Speed 
Touch Home) or the service.  

I need help in figuring out what it might be so I can present my case to
BellSouth.  What can/should I look for in ethereal or tcpdump?  Has anyone else
seen anything like this with BS or any other DSL provider?  Are there any Linux
friendly DSL providers who would work with me if I decide to switch?  Any
feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Chuck

-- 
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|Chuck Mattern	        | "People often find it easier to be a result |
|camattern at acm.org      | of the past than a cause of the future."    |
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