Hi Keith, I've been mulling over this email from you all week and trying to work up a reply that will help solve your issues. Unfortunately, I think we're talking about two seperate but related issues here. And I honestly think that maybe having one or more of us come to your house would be a quicker solution here. Long long rambling email to follow.... -------------------------------------- internet at home -------------------------------------- First off, you want to get faster/better/cheaper internet working at your house, since the old provider to dumping you. At this point, I think you're options are cable modem. Now you have a whole bundle of wires you need to check over. But remember that you only really care about the wire coming in from the street, since the rest of them are just feeds to different rooms/locations inside the house. Since you do not have TV setup, this makes things simpler. Just disconnect everything. Then, hook the cable modem upto the one wire coming in from the street and give it power. If you get a single, the lights will come up and give you some status and let you know if you found the right wire. In my house I have Charter Spectrum and the wire comes in and goes through a splitter, and the cable modem gets the first and best signal port from my four way splitter. The rest go to various TV cable drops in rooms around the house. So once you have signal and you can get on the internet, that issue is mostly solved. Running ethernet or Wifi through the rest of the house is just icing on the cake. -------------------------------------- firewalls and wifi - lots to discuss! -------------------------------------- And of course running your own firewall and just using their cable modem as a modem is another wrinkle!! I tend to run my own firewall and wifi on seperate systems here at home. Charter will send you a combined box, but it's never clear how much control you really have over it. I'm going to skip over all this right now since I'm assuming Charter sent you (or will send you) a combined unit to do all this. -------------------------------------- email from/to your own domains -------------------------------------- The big issue here is that nowdays Charter and other big ISPs do NOT like people sending or even getting email on port 25. Mostly the sending. So they usually tend to block outgoing port 25 traffic. They might also not be totally happy with web services, but that's another issue. So this is where having a VPS (Virtual Private Server) in the cloud running linux is a solution. But!!! You need to change how email goes out from your internal linux systems. I can help since I have this exact same setup. My main system (quad) runs postfix and knows to forward all outgoing emails to mail.stoffel.org over port 587, the submission port. I have setup a username/password combination for postfix as a whole to use to login and send emails. mail.stoffel.org is a VPS running Debian (I think) out in Linode. Not perfect, but not terrible. I have postfix/dovecot/spamassin up there and it's costs me something like $9/mon for a one CPU/1gb of RAM server which I completely manage. This is where my limited external web server is, where my MX records for stoffel.org point to, and where I send emails from to the outside world. Works quite well. But there are some problems at times with places like charter.net blocking my IP since Linode does sometimes host spammers, and so the big big guys tend to block not by IP, but by entire subnet blocks. There might be other web providers out there, at varying levels of cost and performance that you can use. I used to use Digital Ocean, but their subnet blocks have such a horrible reputation that I moved to Linode. And I was still blocked by charter until I found an internal contact who was able to open up my single IP to allow incoming email. Whew. Anyway, I'd be happy to come on over and look at your systems and help you out. Just let me know!
"Keith" == Keith Wright via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
Kevin Stratton via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
I am not sure how helpful this is, The Comcast technician that installed my cable modem insisted that all the splitters be removed
It might be very helpful. It explains why there are coax cables hanging out of the walls all over the house and more hanging from the basement ceiling, but almost none are connected at all.
Somebody thought it would be a good idea to put a TV in every room, but it didn't work.
If you can find a cable that leaves the house, that is the cable you should be most interested in.
It's difficult to trace cables; they are all inside the walls, but I find one that comes out of the wall and goes into the the bottom of a small metal box. The front of the box has 8 coax connectors, but only one has a cable. That cable goes through the ceiling and out of the wall upstairs behind a big shelf that looks like a place to put a TV.
I have a DSL splitter, which has the outside line going in and two outputs, one is voice the other digital. I think that by "splitter" you don't mean that, but just a passive one-to-many connector, with output just copies of the input, like a power strip. That's what the metal box looks like.
-- Keith _______________________________________________ WLUG mailing list -- wlug@lists.wlug.org To unsubscribe send an email to wlug-leave@lists.wlug.org Create Account: https://wlug.mailman3.com/accounts/signup/ Change Settings: https://wlug.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/wlug.lists.wlug.org/ Web Forum/Archive: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/message/OSDDLL...