ufw eating SRV records

Thank you for reporting the bug and helping to make Ubuntu even better. While it seems clear that your firewall is blocking your packets, it is a problem with your firewall policy, and not ufw, the tool to help you implement the policy. This bug is being converted into a question. It sounds like you may need a separate connection tracking module for gmail/xmpp, or simply to accept packets from gmail's xmpp server.

Hi all,
      I don't know what you mean like

"It sounds like you may need a separate connection tracking module for gmail/xmpp, or simply to accept packets from gmail's xmpp server."

Could you be more simplistic or give a straight answer as to where I'm going wrong. Shouldn't just opening port 5222 and port 5223 have been enough.

Also what is a 'connection tracking module' how or where do I find it?

Jamie there were some updates yesterday, what it has done is now I'm able to talk and view gmail/xmpp contacts but not IRC

For IRC and other networks it gives a "Waiting for a network connection" status

A workaround I got and which works is first close down pidgin.

Then do a sudo /etc/init.d/Networkmanager stop

Then you get both gmail/jabber/xmpp as well as IRC in one go :)

Some protocols cannot be handled with simple packet filtering and need help via a kernel module that knows about the protocol. The classic example is ftp.

That said, xmpp should not require this normally, as I use ufw and pidgin and jabber without issue. However, I do not use gmail or SRV. Basically what I am getting at is I am not familiar enough with the protocol to say that gmail/pidgin does not require a connection tracking module which may or may not exist.

ufw does work fine with IRC and dhcp, and your latest comment suggests you are having network problems unrelated to ufw.

I did give advice which assuming your network is working, you can use to make sure that gmail works:
"simply to accept packets from gmail's xmpp server"

Something like:
$ sudo ufw allow from <ip address of gmail server>

If gmail has multiple IP addresses, you'll need to use the above rule on each.