Help? Any email and networking gurus out there?

[Rajah]

We've got an interesting problem here at home that I'm hoping some techie out there can help us answer. DH and I have both run out of ideas :/

We're set up on a home network. DSL comes in to our Linksys router and is then routed to each of our 3 computers on the network. (Yes there is an email question in this). Well, I just recently installed a mail client on my machine (Lotus Notes to be specific but I'm getting the same problem with Eudora and Outlook Express)

DH is on a 300 MHz machine running Win98 and using the wireless port to our router. He can send and recieve email from outside the network (name@earthlink.net for example).

Our home server is a 266 running WinNT. It can send and recieve mail from outside the network.

My machine is a 1gig running WindowsME. Once, and only once, I was able to retrieve mail from outside our network. It didn't work after that. So we reset my internal-network IP. Now I can *get* mail from outside the network. However, I still can't *send* mail. For some reason, my computer just can't see smtp.earthlink.net no matter how we try to reach it (telnet, mail client, etc).

This is really driving us crazy. There is no reason that we can find that I can't send mail but the other two machines on the network can, unless it's something about WinME that we're not aware of.

Is there anyone out there with any suggestion?

 

[Cricket2]

I'm going to make some assumptions and you tell me if I'm right...

This is all POP3 mail?

The NT machine is not a post office right? (i.e. an Exchange server)

Can your ME machine ping the SMTP server?

If so, trace it and post the results.

That should be enough for now.

 

[Cricket2]

I can't ping it. (207.217.120.204) That might be the problem.

I can't ping the POP server either though.

JC

 

[Rajah]

<< This is all POP3 mail? >>

The mail I am trying to get and as of last night was finally able to get is indeed POP3. The mail we're trying to send is through SMTP.

<< The NT machine is not a post office right? (i.e. an Exchange server) >>
Correct, it is not.

<< Can your ME machine ping the SMTP server? >>
I believe it tries and response times out. However, the other two machines can successfully ping it as well as telnet.

<< If so, trace it and post the results. >>
Tracert goes nowhere

<< I can't ping it. (207.217.120.204) That might be the problem.

I can't ping the POP server either though. >>
Last night and earlier today, Earthlink was completely down. That may be why you can't ping it. I'm guessing (total guess) that they got hit by one of the viruses going around. Maybe not, though, because this does happen on occasion and will be back up within 24 hours (which would be tonight)

 

[Cricket2]

I wouldn't try anything until they are back up again reliably. You may fix something and not know it because they are down.

If you can't ping their server when they are up, then it's not a mail problem, it's a networking problem with the ME machine (probably).

I don't know ME, but short of a setting, I doubt that's what's causing the problem. I'd also say it's local to your LAN if the other 2-3 machines do work properly.

I will need to know more about how it's set up without you giving up too much info.

JC

 

[Rajah]

What else do you need to know? I don't know enough about it to know what else would be needed

 

[Cricket2]

Is the NT machine connected to the router the same way as the ME machine?

I am assuming you are not using DHCP and have assigned a valid static IP address to the ME machine.

Can the NT unit tracert any WAN IP address? That router may have it disabled alltogether (mine is that way.)

Which unit is the control unit for the router? Make sure all 3 computers are set up the same way at the router from the administration program for the router.

Compare the TCP/IP settings on the ME unit with the settings on the NT unit (I'm fairly certain that they should be the same, but again, I'm not familiar with ME.)

Kick it. (Just a suggestion.)

There is some more advanced stuff if you can't get it from this stuff.

JC

 

[Cricket2]

Alex!

 

[WebmasterAlex]

I still can't ping it reliably, there are obviously some problems there. Untill it comes up solid this will be pretty hard to figure out. In your mail setup try replacing smtp.earthlink.net with the actual IP address.

 

[Rajah]

<< Is the NT machine connected to the router the same way as the ME machine? >>

As far as I know, yes.

<< I am assuming you are not using DHCP and have assigned a valid static IP address to the ME machine. >>
Actually, no. We're using a service Alex recommended called TZO. It's been really neat overall and seems to work well. TZO is a service that runs all the time and regularly checks the IP. If the IP has changed, it will re-route the domain-name pointer to the new IP. Allows you to have domain names with a dynamic IP. Pretty cool

<< Can the NT unit tracert any WAN IP address? That router may have it disabled alltogether (mine is that way.) >>
NT unit and DH's computer can both tracert. Mine can tracert to other areas, just hasn't been able to find Earthlink. It's as though the existance of earthlink is hidden from my computer period.

<< Which unit is the control unit for the router? Make sure all 3 computers are set up the same way at the router from the administration program for the router. >>

All 3 are, as far as I know, set up the same through the router. We control the router through IE from any of the 3 machines. The ME machine is the one we use to control the settings on the router most often.

<< Compare the TCP/IP settings on the ME unit with the settings on the NT unit (I'm fairly certain that they should be the same, but again, I'm not familiar with ME.) >>
As far as I know, they're the same. DH deals with networking, email, and router type stuff at work all the time and none of what he knows has fixed this problem. Other than calling earthlink when we get home to see if their system really *is* down, I don't know what tech support we could call and get help with. Earthlink says they won't support home networked systems though they do allow it, so I suspect they'd just tell us to disable the home networking. I don't know if this is a problem with my physical machine or the router. If it's the router, then why is it only happening to *my* machine?


Alex:
<< In your mail setup try replacing smtp.earthlink.net with the actual IP address>>
Tried that. It still couldn't find it. I also tried going into the hosts file in one of the Windows subdirectories and adding earthlink there. Still no luck.

 

[Rajah]

It's got to have something to do with the router. I just spent an hour and a half on the phone with the tech support guys at Earthlink and by removing the router from the equation, all problems went away. I can send and recieve email and connectivity is fully back up and running. So I guess the next step is to see if we can find a phone number for the linksys people

 

[BobBrazeal]

I believe you mentioned that you "reset" the IP address on your ME machine. I'm not familiar with TZO, I'll look it up so this question might not apply. Are you setting the IP address locally on your ME machine. JC asked about using DHCP. I've got a router (not Linksys) and that is the way I've got it set up. When I power on a system it goes to the router to obtain an IP for that session. What I was wondering is if you've set the IP on the ME machine such that it isn't in the address range of the router. I could easily do that with mine if I were to set a static IP address on the computer without making sure that the router was expecting that machine name to have a static address.

 

[BobBrazeal]

Ok, I've gotten the scoop on TZO. Are you hosting an external web site on one of your machines? On which machine is the TZO client running?

If your router is like mine, it has the IP address assigned by your ISP visible to the net but the computers on your side of the router are in a reserved address space; within one of the following ranges;

10.0.0.1 to 10.255.255.254
or
172.16.0.1 to 172.31.255.252
or
192.168.0.1 to 102.168.255.254.

The IP address assigned by your ISP is the one that changes.

Is any of this correct? I'm working from the way my router operates.

 

[Rajah]

Yes we are hosting a web server on our system. That's why we're using TZO. Our internal-network IPs are static and that's what I reset on my machine.

The web server is on the NT machine, which prior to the router busting was working fine.

Now we can't get any internet connectivity while going through the router, but can when we take the router out of the equation. None of the changes we made to any settings made any difference, so the tech support guy told us to send it in for warranty repair.

 

[Rajah]

Well... now it's working completely I told the router to act as a router (routing internal networking stuff only) then told it to go back to acting like a gateway (portal to the outside internet, what we want). Either doing that reset things so it is working now or it's a complete coincidence, but whatever the case for the moment everything is working.

I also found that earthlink apparently has 2 SMTP servers... I switched to the second one and now my mail sends too.

Thanks all... I'll let you know if anything further develops

*hug*

 

[BobBrazeal]

What I've got is a router/firewall that I have set up to do Network Address Translation (NAT) so it is configured to serve as my DHCP server. The router has one IP address to the net and then maintains another network within a private address space for the computers attached to it.

It sounds like you've got a setup where each of your systems is assigned a valid public IP address directly from your ISP or you are setup for Port Forwarding to be able to open up Port 80 to the NT box where you are serving up your site. I've not done port forwarding at all with mine, although it is capable of it. I'm not hosting anything except to my other PCs internally.

 

[WebmasterAlex]

AHH!!!!! A linksys router.. make sure you have the latest version of the firmware for the router, some of the earlier versions were a bit buggy.

 

[Rajah]

We've decided the linksys tech support guy had no clue what he was doing. He never had us hit the reset button or do anything else to reset to factory settings, and never even asked what firmware we were running let alone tell us to upgrade it

Apparently last night's connection was just coincidence because 10 minutes after posting, it went down again. DH continued trying to connect and got through once more and found there is indeed a new firmware upgrade. He was able to download and apply it and now we're back up and running. And my email problem is gone. We'll see if this lasts or is another fluke, but unless it goes down again this weekend we're not sending it in to the factory again

Thanks all!