Search Again: Re: AOL problems From: Chris Buxton Date: Sunday, June 7, 1998 Time: 9:44:00 am >Here's more on this. your help is appreciated: > >I can't ping aol.com or do a traceroute to aol.com. I get "couldn't >resolve host name". Other domains resolve fine. The problem seems unique >to aol.com. > >An AOL tech said that IE on aol uses port 5190 and not "80-80" I didn't >understand what he meant. Can anyone elighten me as to what he means and >how to fix this? Sounds to me like he's talking about the source port. Every packet sent out needs a source address and destination address, and these addresses include port numbers. That means that your webserver would have to respond to port 5190, not 80. That's OK; a web browser sending from port 80 would be weird anyway. Source ports for requests are usually chosen at random from among any unused ports on the sending machine, and are often limited to ports above 1024. This is why, in all the filtering examples in router manuals, there is a line to permit any "established" conversations. That's because, once a request has come in on a permitted port, it's not unheard of for the conversation to move to another set of port numbers - FTP servers do this routinely. Bottom line: the AOL tech seems to have thrown you a line of BS to get you to go away. Assuming you've got a normal set of filters on your router, including a line that permits "established" packets, there's nothing you need to do regarding ports to fix this problem of being unavailable to their users. BTW: I was able to resolve <aol.com> and <www.aol.com> just fine, to several IP addresses each. Reverse lookup on the addresses yield names like <www01.web.aol.com>. However, I was not able to ping any of the addresses. ________________________________ Chris Buxton Internet and Database Consultant

Messages In This Thread: AOL problems by Karl Schroll on Jun 6, 1998 at 4:44:00 pm AOL problems by Karl Schroll on Jun 6, 1998 at 6:49:00 pm Re: AOL problems by Fokko van Duin on Jun 6, 1998 at 8:26:00 pm Re: AOL problems by Chris Buxton on Jun 7, 1998 at 9:44:00 am