"Keith Wright" <kwright@free-comp-shop.com> wrote:
[...] Hey, I wouldn't mind a few of the sort-of-gory details.
I'll respond to my bits!
I have recently installed Speakeasy DSL and am thinking of running my own DNS and mail.
I have no first-hand experience with DSL, but I would expect it's shares a lot of characteristics (in terms of terms-of-services, reliability) with other residential services. There's usually no guarantee of stellar reliability, and many don't support (or allow) "servers". That's an important consideration if your mail is important to you.
I am willing to have a bit of trouble in order to learn how it works, but is it common for DSL to "go down"? Why is that?
Again, I don't use DSL, but I have had plenty of outages both here and back in Phoenix that have nothing to do with the unerlying technology. Your ISP can have routing problems to the rest of the world, their equipment or DNS servers can be misconfigured, and of course denial-of-service attacks can take their toll. Here, I've become much more familiar with power-related problems. Not "common" but certainly not business-class either.
[...] Losing my mail was fine, but the family went nuts when I
was on the road and we had an outage.
What's up with that? DSL or TV cable? Why outage?
I wound up moving my SMTP to a $2/mo. hosting plan that will queue mail for me until I poll using POP via fetchmail. I've
In the example I cited, it was HFC (cable). The reasons for the outage varied from power outages (my end and theirs), changes in service (it's residential -- they change it when they want i.e. sudden port blocking) and those mysterious 3 hour drops that I never could pin down exactly. permanently
pointed my MX record there, as their reliability is far better than mine (residential cable).
Wow! Where did you find mail hosting for $2/mo?
There are no doubt others, but I went with bmhost.com. It's nothing stellar if you're after hosting for a big website, but you get 10M storage and connectivity seems good. I poll it every 5 minutes via fetchmail and sort things out on my server. They're not particulary linux-aware though, but the servers are RedHat. You can get (chroot) ssh access. The important thing is I can survive an outage on my end without losing mail, and they offer webmail for those situations. Tell 'em I sent ya (ttlexceeded.com is the domain I host there) and we can probably pool to save a few bucks. I paid dyndns.org the $30 one-time fee for "custom" DNS, so I've got my DNS set up there, with dynamically updated entries for my home system (updated via the dhclient scripts), but nice, stable entries pointing at bmhost for MX and web addresses. The only thing I can't do is set up anti-UCE on my SMTP server though bmhost offers some, and they do provide anti-virus scanning standard, so I don't get the glamor of fighting those on my own... which I've found gives me a lot more free time. Of course, none of this applies if you're running a business on your home system. - Bob