MSN Messenger through Debian gateway
I've been having a strange problem, and wondered if anyone could help.
My wife and I have our home LAN going to the Internet through Bell
Sympatico DSL through a gateway machine running Potato, using the ipmasq
package. She runs Win98 (*) and uses MSN Messenger (**). What we've
noticed is that Messenger occasionally goes bonkers and can't figure out
how to talk to its masters back in Redmond, no matter what we try. The
only way we've figured out to fix it is to take her machine off the LAN,
and then she uses a dial-up backup. Suddenly Messenger starts working.
Hang up the dial-up connection and plug her machine back in to the LAN,
and it keeps working for a while, until it decides to go bonkers again.
It seems to go bonkers when she reboots her machine. I thought at one
point maybe Bell was dropping our connection on us and giving us a
different IP when it re-connects, so I started keeping track of the IP
address of the gateway. No change there.
The REALLY weird thing is that this never happened when we were using
Rogers@Home cable modem (***). I do know that Micro$oft invested a big
chunk of money in Rogers Cable not too long ago...
Any suggestion on how to track this down? Can I turn on some tracing on
the gateway to see what it's trying to do and maybe why it's not
working? I took a look through the existing log files and didn't see
anything obvious.
Thanks in advance,
Jason Bleazard
(*) I have to have a Windows machine around for work, so we're working
on upgrading our workstations and building a third Windows machine out
of the old parts. Then she wants to switch her machine to Debian. In
the mean time, she's stuck.
(**) Because that's what her friends use
(***) Switched from Rogers after they terminated our service for
"running a server"... translation: we were using fetchmail to collect
mail and running it through the local delivery service to drop it in the
correct user's mailbox. They didn't like seeing the SMTP port open,
never mind that it was set in hosts.deny to disallow all external
connections. Sigh.
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