Sendmail Ident

[David Crowe]

We are experiencing up to a 30 sec. delay on some connections whenever we try to telnet to certain SMTP gateways. Other gateways are instantaneous. We have been told that this is a result of sendmail using "ident" and that we need to allow this through the firewall. We are using a Checkpoint firewall but it doesn't seem to matter whether it is allowed or not. The gateways that have a fast connection are fast whether it is active or not and the slow connections are the same. We have had some complaints from some of the gateways that we are connecting to that we are flooding them with ident calls.
I guess I have two questions, 1) is these delays a result of ident and 2) can ident be disabled?

[Dave Kelly_1 · Accepted solution]

Ident is configured in sendmail.cf by setting Timeout.ident to a non-zero value.

This is set on the machine that you are connecting to so they will have to make the change.

[Juan González]

Hi David,
if the slow-response SMTP gateways are sending you ident requests you hava another option:

- Instead of make a rule in the firewall to DROP ident packets from the gateways, make a rule that REJECT ident packets from the gateways (in this case gateways will receive a packet rejecting their ident connections and will continue working)

Best regards
JGM