We found strange behaviour while investigating why POP3 sessions are so slow on Mercury side even when no load and no new e-mails are waiting.
We are using Mercury in Netware mode - so Mercury checks passwords from Netware 4.x directory.
Session log show us that password verification took all the time at least 3 sec (like below):
---
10:58:35.093: >> USER mart<cr><lf>
10:58:35.093: << +OK mart is known here.<cr><lf>
10:58:35.125: >> PASS xxxxxx<cr><lf>
10:58:38.145: << +OK Welcome! 0 messages (0 bytes)<cr><lf>
----
But strangely, investigating it even more, we found some few users who didn't have this 3 sec delay!?
We started to analyze what is different about them - why they do not have that delay - user rights, mailbox configuration and content - everything was similar.
And what turned out - beleive or not - it depends on if you have all-numeric password or not!
Later we examined it on several users then and it is 100% sure - at least in our Mercury configuration - if you have all-numeric password (like 123456) you get PASS response fast (0 sec) but if you have password with alpha (like test12) you get PASS response not faster than after 3 sec.
So my question is why this kind of side-effect and can it be avoided somehow?
PS! Just for additional information - Netware invalid password retry time is 3 sec. Therefore it seems to me that for alpha passwords Mercury tries the user password first with some incorrect method, gets 3 sec retry delay and then verifies it another (correct) way and gets OK.
??
But regardless this problem thank you for the wonderful product, Mercury and Pegasus, we use for years already!
With best regards,
Märt Laak
[quote user="Märt Laak"]
PS! Just for additional information - Netware invalid password retry time is 3 sec. Therefore it seems to me that for alpha passwords Mercury tries the user password first with some incorrect method, gets 3 sec retry delay and then verifies it another (correct) way and gets OK.
[/quote]
If you change the 'invalid password retry' on the Netware server does the delay change accordingly?
[quote user="dilberts_left_nut"][quote user="Märt Laak"]
PS! Just for additional information - Netware invalid password retry time is 3 sec. Therefore it seems to me that for alpha passwords Mercury tries the user password first with some incorrect method, gets 3 sec retry delay and then verifies it another (correct) way and gets OK.
[/quote]
If you change the 'invalid password retry' on the Netware server does the delay change accordingly?
[/quote]
I am not aware how this can be changed. Googled for it but found nothing about this setting. Do you have information how this can be changed?
