What stops the handshake
 

I want to establish a socket connection to a remote machine. I have this simple ACL:

SITE A
------
access-list acl_inside permit ip host 10.1.1.1 host 20.2.2.2
access-group acl_inside in interface inside

At remote SITE B, they have no access-list applied to the inside interface, so all traffic should be allowed back out.

I can ping the remote machine so the basic connectivity is there, but I cannot establish a tcp session so I don't seem to be receiving the SYN-ACK from them. What could stop it?

Just to make it a bit more interesting, there's a vpn tunnel between the sites, but it seems to be up and running fine (and the ping works across it). Since both sides do a sysopt connection permit-ipsec, the outside interface ACLs are not consulted here.

Any ideas would be useful. TIA.

What stopped it.
 

Because the static NAT being done on the remote end was incorrect, I asked for one machine (the intended mapped address) but got a different one (the actual mapped address). That one had no listener bound to the port I was telnetting to.

Ethereal quickly revealed that I was getting RST/ACKs which of course are tcp refusals. Once the addressing was fixed, the correct machine answered with SYN/ACKs as normal.