FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2002 17:13:27 -0400, Blake Nyquist
<blake.nyquist AT voyager.net> wrote:
> The only other difference I can think of is 
> that the "hanging machine" is outside our firewall and has to traverse 
> different ports through the firewall for communication with the 
> database.  Also, we've tried setting the tdsversion in freetds.conf
> equal to both 4.2 and 7.0.

Well, that certainly does sound suspicious, doesn't it?  :)

Blake, if I were you, I'd turn on the FreeTDS log on the broken box.  It's
a long shot, but it might provide a clue.  Also, if you can post a tcpdump
trace of the failed connection somewhere, some Ethereal-savvy person here
might be able to tell you what's happening on the wire.  

Before I did those things, though, I'd look real hard at that firewall of
yours.  This smells to me like something about an MTU mismatch.  Is there
a VPN or proxy host involved?  
I bet if you use tcpdump on both sides of the firewall, you'll find out
that something isn't making it through.  For the record, the TDS protocol
doesn't do anything funky; it sits atop tcp and behaves itself.  

HTH and regards, 

--jkl

PS. You don't mention what version of FreeTDS.  It would matter if we take
this further.