Subject: Windows95 IP Stack and Imap

From: Rachel Louden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 16:20:44 -0400

Hello

We have recently switched to an IMAP server on one of our UNIX machines.
Which is accessed by mulitple platforms -- UNIX, VAX, Win3, Win95,
WinNT, and MAC. The new server works fine erverywhere except for on the
WIn95 and WinNT machines. With those Operating Systems everytime you
mail a message or list a folder, you receive the error [IMAP Connection
Broken-No Server Response]. 

We have done the following to diagnos the problem:

	We installed Pine 3.92 on both Win3 and Win95 boxes. Everything worked
on the Win3 machines but not on the Windows 95 ones.

	We installed Sun Soltice Mail Client on both Win3 and Win95 boxes with
the same results.

	We snooped the traffic between the client and server of various
Pine sessions.

Note: We were able to install the 32 bit applications on the Windows 3.1
machines because we have Win32apps installed. We are using the Novell
Workplace IP stack on our Win3 machines and the MS TCPIP stack on the
Windows 95 ones.

These results lead us to believe that there was a problem with the MS 
TCPIP stack. 

We are trying to use a DNS name alias to our IMAP server --namely
imap.uncg.edu. It looks as though the IP stack is incorrectly caching
the information associated with the alias. 

When a user first starts pine, the client machine sends a querry to the
UNIX name server to get the authoritative name and IP number of the IMAP
server at login. The login succeeds, but when a user tries to list
folders, the client machine fails to recognize that it is already
connected to the imap server and logs in a second time. After the
folders are listed, the client machine logs out and the broken
connection server error is recieved. 

When we use the authoritative name of the UNIX machine in place of the
alias, everything works fine.

In case there was a problem with the DHCP server we defined the Windows
95 machine's ip address locally and used the c:\windows\hosts file to
point
to the imap servers without result.

Additionally in order to test things out, we tried to connect the
Windows95 machine  to an imap server on a VMS machine and everything
worked. 

We called Microsoft Technical support and were told the Microsoft does
not support TCPIP connections to UNIX machines and thus they were unable
to help us. They said that there is some patch that we can put on our
UNIX machine to get in to work though. Does anyone know of any solutions 
or what that patch might be.

Our IMAP server is running Solaris v2.5 and is patched to current. revs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rachel