WinXP Internet Sharing Bug

However, they require custom client software, which isn't availible for the Mac. No biggie, he plugs the phone's USB adapter into his Dell notebook, and a Orinoco WiFi card into the PC Card slot, turned on Internet sharing and now my TiBook can share his connection. (Tip: you need to use 10.2's software base station functionality and create a network).

While I could access the web and ssh fine, I could neither send nor receive email. Debugging turned up that the SMTP and POP3 protocol banners were getting munged somehow (they looked like random garbage). I was starting to think Sprint was intentionally munging the banners to hurt spammers, but why POP3 and why did it always work on the Dell?

Turns out that when Outlook Express is running on the Dell (and thus somehow is working with the SMTP and POP3 ports), WinXP gets confused and tosses garbage (probably some uninitialized buffer) to Internet Sharing mail clients.

Update: OE is not the culprit after all -- the XP Internet Sharing is just generally broken for ports 25 and 110. After a reboot, without launching OE, it still doesn't work. POP3 access on the Dell also flakes out about three times per day.

I wrote a "port bridge" in Java (a simple app that listens on a port and pipes connections to another server/port) and by using two bridges (one on my server at home, another on my PowerBook), I'm running mail happily over ports 2500 and 1100. Hey, at least it works!

Sunday, January 26, 2003
12:00 AM