[HECnet] netowrk flapping....

[Peter Coghlan]

With my connection, I noticed that the circuit would disconnect and 
reconnect periodically. It corresponded to the timeout in my firewall 
causing the UDP association to be lost. When I increased the timeout in 
my firewall for these port 700 UDP "connections", that made my circuit 
much more stable.

Unfortunately, my firewall (a SonicWALL NSA 240) is also stupid in that 
it *must* randomize the source port for outgoing packets, so I'm not 
able to connect to HECnet because MultiNet insists that the source port 
must also be 700 and mine are coming through with random port numbers.


When I worked with them, I found that you could always rely on a firewall
to mess something up somewhere :-(

Right now, I've got no firewall (although I do have NAT in my DSL router)
and I can get everything I want to work correctly with one small exception.
I never got that close when there was a firewall in the way!

I have a Multinet link and I ocassionally see the "Unexpected packet type"
error. However, I've had only 26 of them since November last year. If others
are seeing far more of these errors and are also running firewalls, I would
suggest looking closely at what their firewalls are up to.

Regards.
Peter Coghlan.