zmailer / pidentd

[Remco van de Meent <remco@dnd.utwente.nl>]

Hi,

I have a little problem/question regarding the zmailer mail server.

A popular ident-daemon called 'pidentd' is able to handle multiple
queries during one connection. This kind of behaviour is also
documented in RFC1413 as shown below this message.

What happens that upon connection to zmailer server from a host with
pidentd running, it takes quite some time (>15 minutes in older zmailer
releases, currently the waiting time is about 10 seconds:

$ date ; echo quit | socket speer.nl.uu.net 25 ; date
Mon May 29 15:15:21 CEST 2000
220 speer.nl.uu.net ZMailer Server 2.99.52-pre3 #1 ESMTP+IDENT ready at Mon, 29 May 2000 15:15:31 +0200
221 2.0.0 speer.nl.uu.net Out
Mon May 29 15:15:33 CEST 2000

During this waiting time, the remote zmailer server has en open
(CONNECTED) connection to the ident/auth port of the local machine
running pidentd.

With previous version (2.99.49 for example), the waiting time was that
long that mail did not get delivered at all because of that waiting
time (timeouts in the MTA trying to send mail to the zmailer server),
but luckily this isn't the case anymore.

I didn't have a very close look on the zmailer code, but does it wait
for the server to close the connection or so? Maybe it is better if
zmailer would send a "quit" message or something like that - it would
be ignored by ident-daemons not knowing about extensions to the basic
ident protocol I guess.

It is not something I'd worry about too much, but maybe it is of
interest to someone.. :)


Kind regards, 

Remco.


-- excerpt from rfc1413 --
2.  OVERVIEW

   This is a connection based application on TCP.  A server listens for
   TCP connections on TCP port 113 (decimal). Once a connection is
   established, the server reads a line of data which specifies the
   connection of interest. If it exists, the system dependent user
   identifier of the connection of interest is sent as the reply. The
   server may then either shut the connection down or it may continue
   to read/respond to multiple queries.
-----