One of my servers seems to be rather slow to connect to many others on the net (I've noticed this primarily in outbound email). netstat shows a large number (close to my remote concurrency limit) in SYN_SENT state. My logs show over half the connections eventually failing on the generic "unable to establish an SMTP connection" (which defers the message for later retry). I find the same thing when I make manual (telnet host 25) attempts at connections, and when I do it on my other server for comparison I get snappy responses (to the exact same end-point, so I'm keeping other environmental things close to the same, only seconds between the attempts). So the issue would seem NOT to be the MTA install/config on the two systems (qmail, for those who care anyway), but *something* else about them. Both are running RedHat 7.2 with lots of updates. They both have dual IPs (one static, one local) on one NIC, they're plugged into adjacent ports on the same hub eventually connected to the DSL line. A prophylactic reboot made no difference (not very surprising, but now I don't have to worry about it). So what else should I be checking? Oh, load average is 2.0 on a system running 2 copies of seti-at-home, i.e. no load to mention beyond that (dual-processor system). No swapping going on (640MB of memory on that one). -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/ John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info