Keep alive

[besttb]

Has anyone had a situation where a server had to be 'awakened' to access it from outside?

I have a situation where I am remotely administering a RH 8.0 server through WEbmin port 10000 and SSH port 22, and FTp port 21. Either the server is down or the network is not letting me in (both refuted by local support).

Is there any 'sleep' function built into these boxes? This is a test webserver running apache and I have set KeepAlive to Yes in both the hhtpd.conf and the sshd_config files.

One of my clients is running SSH from command line (BSD Based Unix) and another is using Reflections (Windows Based) for SSH. Both from different Internet access points - both unsuccessful.

Any ideas as to what may be wrong - it sounds like the server is down, disconnected, or I am being blocked by something. Any way I can tell for sure - remotely?

Thanks!
Tim

[terets]

Does the server sit behind a firewall? If so, do you know what type?

Also, you don't have any power management enabled on the server, right?

[besttb]

here is the dumb reply of the year:

How do you check for that remotely?

I'm not answering the firewall question ;)

[terets]

Do some searching in the forums for the power management piece. I'm not quite sure how to either, I just know I never install those packages on Gentoo.

As far as the firewall, each one treats incoming traffic differently. For that reason, that could be the culprit for you.

As in the case of the PIX from Cisco, it does application inspection (stateful packet inspection) for all inbound packets for ftp and http right out of the box. I know that Checkpoint does even more detection for this.

Also, depending on what the firewall is will be relevant to you connecting to your machine. Ie, smurf attacks and IP spoofing. It may suspect that you are attacking the machine.

It's extreme if it's a firewall problem. I'd start with power managment and go from there. If that doesn't work, i'd open up ICMP and do a constant ping and see what happens, ie does it drop off the net. From there, i'd start investigating the firewall.

Believe me, firewalls are NOT perfect. They fail or screw up more often than one might think. However, you gotta know your stuff to prove it.