[80714] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Google DNS problems?!?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert L Mathews)
Tue May 10 20:52:08 2005
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 17:51:39 -0700
From: Robert L Mathews <lists@tigertech.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20050508115407.05cf4e18@mail.iucc.ac.il>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> I really like Google. I like what they do. But lately, their security
> team is a joke. I had a problem with their POP Gmail service and the
> advise I got from their Gmail team was to turn off my CA EZ antivirus
> and my ZApro firewall and to try again and see if the problem repeats
> itself. For a moment I thought it was an April 1st joke.
While I know exactly what you mean, I run POP service for several tens
of thousands of mailboxes, and broken antivirus scanners that insert
themselves between the mail client and the server are now our leading
cause of "my mail program can't read messages any more" support
questions. By far.
And the second most common cause is -- wait for it -- broken personal
firewall systems that have apparently gone insane and decided to block a
port for no explainable reason (we actually see this with POP, SMTP, and
FTP).
So when the basic "are your hostname, username and password correct?"
check doesn't help, we now tell our customers to try exactly what Google
told you, as long as they have XP service pack 2 (our incoming mail is
already virus scanned). Depressingly often, doing so fixes the problem.
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/
