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"Keith" == Keith Wright via WLUG writes:

Well, the BIG problem that I have feared so long has arrived. GTT (my ISP) sent me a letter. The letter does not mention it, but GTT has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Is this gtt.net? And you're only getting a DSL line from them? Sounds like they're just giving up the local home business, probably not the business service.

The letter is full of things that I do not fully understand, but the bottom line is: "We no longer want to do business with you. You have a few months to get a new ISP, then we will unplug the wire."

Did you ask about your IP being transferable? It's probably not easy, but you might be able to do so.

It seems there is not enough money to be made by charging a monthly fee to leave everything as it is.

So they're providing you with internet access as well? Do you have a budget and could you get another local ISP with a cable modem? I suspect most places don't want to support DSL anymore if they can help it.

I have had the same IPv4 address for almost exactly 20 years and a lot things depend on that. There are three domain names that point to that address. There is a name server, a mail server, and a web server.

As long as your DNS is updated, it doesn't matter what the IP address is behind it. Is looks like keithdiane.net is your IP of 66.92.74.188 and you actually have the reverse DNS setup properly as well, which is good! So the biggest problem you're going to find is getting outgoing email from your own domain using a residential ISP. For more money I'm sure you can get a business ISP with a dedicated IP, but it's going to be much more money.

I don't know how many of those things can be kept working with a new ISP. I will spend a few days asking for advice, and then decide.

What are the services you want/need/like to have? 1. home internet access 2. email to/from @keithdiane.us 3. web server for one or more domains So number 1 is just the basic, and you'd need that no matter what to acess the internet, if you decide to NOT host your services at home any more. If you keep your servers a home, without anyone able to access them, then you don't need number 1. *grin* And it would make it cheaper. Number 2 is easy, I'd be happy to add your domain to my @stoffel.org linode if you like, or help you setup your own IMAP/email server in the cloud. Use linode, but thinking of moving to vultr.com because charter.net blocks all email from all Linode IPs. Sigh... Service 3, is also a Cheap $5/mon web server is trivial on Linode, and again I could host it for you if you like on my Linode, which isn't doing much more than email. One option in Worcester *might* be these guys: https://cyberonic.com/broadband/dsl/ They're near WPI as well. If you have cable TV right now, it might be possible to add on internet, but at a cost. Your budget will influence things alot here.

I don't have much hope of keeping the IP address with a new ISP, but I would like to keep my domain names and continue to send and receive mail with addresses in those domains, and to be able to put up web pages in those domains with a minimum of censorship and advertising. I don't need the name server if there is another way of doing this.

For the DNS, you currently have two servers listed, but only one is working, the "dsl.keithdiane.net" at the same IP as listed above. It's also trivial to spin up DSN in the cloud, because you don't have a backup DNS server for your domain at all.

Currently, that is all done via a DSL line to my basement. It seems that the new way is to "spin up" a virtual machine in the "cloud", and run Linux and servers from there. I don't know much about that.

It can add up, I think I pat around $7/mon for my linode to host my @stoffel.org stuff. It works.

I live in Worcester, about a mile from WPI.

It might be time to look around for other worcester DSL ISPs and see what they offer. Good luck! John

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"Keith" == Keith Wright writes:

John Stoffel via WLUG writes:

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For the DNS, you currently have two servers listed, but only one is working, the "dsl.keithdiane.net" at the same IP as listed above.

You scared me. What do you mean and why do you say it?

Because I wanted to make sure you knew it might not be working like you expected, with out proper redundancy. But I might have been wrong too. It happens!

I use http://www.intodns.com/ to check my dns, and it said (last time I used it; if I understand it) that it contacted both the primary DNS in my basement, and the secondary servers at ns?.he.net, and that they made sense and agreed.

The thing I feel guilty about is that the email address in the SOA record is no good because it was set up with the address I was given (kawright@speakeasy.net) by the original ISP, but somewhere along the time line the ISP of the moment decided it would no longer deliver mail to that address.

I never got around to changing the SOA.

Might be a good idea to try and do it.

In other news: I put a summary of advice I have received from WLUG and others, onto the web page: http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/final.html

Nice!

Check it out, send me additional comments.

Will do when I get a chance, not until the weekend I suspect due to other commitments.

If you have given me relevant advice, you may find your words there, but I have removed names and addresses.

-- Keith

John Stoffel via WLUG writes:

For you, I suspect that in Worcester charter.net (spectrum.net) is your only other option for connectivity.

I am thinking of going that way.

Do you have Cable with them?

No. I don't own a television, but the previous owner of this house did, and when I called Spectrum, they said that I do have a cable, it just needs to be plugged in and activated. They suggested a self-install kit, which can be picked up at the Spectrum store. That would be quick, if it worked, but I foresee all kinds of possible problems. Of the many co-axial cables hanging out of the walls, how can I tell which is the input? Most of them seem to be disconnected.

Once you get this figured out, then you can figure out how you will host your personal domain(s) and web services and such from either home, or out in the cloud.

For that, based upon Hosting Advice 2 http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/final.html#adv2 I am looking at Afterbrst https://afterburst.com/operating-systems/ Has anybody had any experiance with Afterburst? I like them because Linux is their OS, and because a short question got a quick answer which made sense, and I'm not even a customer yet. My current ISP (GTT) thinks I want to read about their big "milestone", which is a slightly different LOGO that they call re-branding. I looked at Oracle Cloud, but it was page after page of "services" with names like: Block, Object, and Archive Storage; Load Balancer and data egress; Monitoring and Notifications Huh? What's that and why do I need it? A few dozen pages of that kind of bafflegab is enough for me. I could find no starting point. -- Keith

Keith, I love the term bafflegab, it's the truth. Every cloud provider has preferred names for things that should just be named sensibly. This doc gives a good overview on how to setup a web server. https://docs.oracle.com/en/learn/lab_compute_instance/index.html#connect-to-... Basically you create a VM "compute" in their parlance, deploy your favorite web server, copy your HTML over, DNS shenanigans and away you go. you'll also need to modify the security settings on the private network that your VM is running on to give it a public IP and allow port 80 in. You're not going to need a load balancer, etc.. Tim. On Wed, Sep 6, 2023 at 8:38 AM Kevin Stratton via WLUG wrote:

I am not sure how helpful this is, The Comcast technician that installed my cable modem insisted that all the splitters be removed so that there is only one cable (with connectors) from the cable going into the house to the modem. It is my understanding that this was done for signal integrity reasons. I am using a consumer router to interface to the modem. I do not know how TVs are wires using this configuration, since I only use over the air for TV.

If you can find a cable that leaves the house, that is the cable you should be most interested in. Follow the cable once it gets inside a house. There is some art to this, I did not know of the cable being routed under a rug. Maybe you can do a perimeter walk of the house outside to find where the cable enters the house to localize the correct cable. I was surprised to learn where my cable was, it was not where logic said it would be.

On 9/6/2023 12:23 AM, Keith Wright via WLUG wrote:

...

John Stoffel via WLUG writes:

...

For you, I suspect that in Worcester charter.net (spectrum.net) is your only other option for connectivity. I am thinking of going that way.

...

Do you have Cable with them? No. I don't own a television, but the previous owner of this house did, and when I called Spectrum, they said that I do have a cable, it just needs to be plugged in and activated. They suggested a self-install kit, which can be picked up at the Spectrum store. That would be quick, if it worked, but I foresee all kinds of possible problems.

Of the many co-axial cables hanging out of the walls, how can I tell which is the input? Most of them seem to be disconnected.

...

Once you get this figured out, then you can figure out how you will host your personal domain(s) and web services and such from either home, or out in the cloud. For that, based upon Hosting Advice 2 http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/final.html#adv2 I am looking at Afterbrst https://afterburst.com/operating-systems/

Has anybody had any experiance with Afterburst?

I like them because Linux is their OS, and because a short question got a quick answer which made sense, and I'm not even a customer yet.

My current ISP (GTT) thinks I want to read about their big "milestone", which is a slightly different LOGO that they call re-branding.

I looked at Oracle Cloud, but it was page after page of "services" with names like: Block, Object, and Archive Storage; Load Balancer and data egress; Monitoring and Notifications

Huh? What's that and why do I need it? A few dozen pages of that kind of bafflegab is enough for me. I could find no starting point.

-- 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/AUKBVW...

---

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/5N7OQV...

-- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

Kevin Stratton via WLUG 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

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!

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"Keith" == Keith Wright via WLUG writes:

Kevin Stratton via WLUG 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...

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"Keith" == Keith Wright writes:

John Stoffel via WLUG writes:

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I've been mulling over this email from you all week and trying to work up a reply that will help solve your issues.

Thank you for caring and thinking about me, but...

...

having one or more of us come to your house would be a quicker solution here.

That will not be necessary.

Great, just wanted to offer since sometimes in person is better than remote support. But you're a smart guy. :-)

Right. That would be nice. I have been working on it, and working on documenting it. Not done, but here:

http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/final.html#spectrum

Great that you've got the cable modem working so far. Can you get an IP from it yet?

...

Running ethernet or Wifi through the rest of the house is just icing on the cake.

A ran ethernet through the house decades ago:

Excellent!

...

So this is where having a VPS (Virtual Private Server) in the cloud running linux is a solution.

That's why I asked this list whether anyone had experience with Afterburt.

I haven't used them at all. I gave you my opinion on other vendors out there. I look forward to hearing your report on how it all goes. One thing I've been looking into is using Ansible to setup my mail server in the cloud, so that I have a repeatable setup, and so I can also 1. clone it easily to home for backups 2. move it easily to another provider if need be, without having to remember all my customizations. It's easier said than done!

Finally, I did what I have done so many times in the past when the internet connection did not work.

I power-cycled the DSL modem --- all better.

Now who'll stop the rain?

Yeah, rain used to make my home phone line goto hell, and with all the rain we've got this year, I wouldn't doubt it's even flakier now.

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"Keith" == Keith Wright via WLUG writes:

John Stoffel via WLUG writes:

...

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Right. That would be nice. I have been working on it, and working on documenting it. Not done, but here:

...

http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/final.html#spectrum

Great that you've got the cable modem working so far. Can you get an IP from it yet?

A (meagre) progress report has been appended to the same place: http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/final.html#spectrum

So I wonder if Spectrum wants you to use the new cable modem to activate? And also, which browser are you running? Chrome or Firefox should be just fine here... but you never know.

My current questions relate to the way DHCP (Dynamic Host Config.) and NAT (Network Address Translation) and static IP addresses should work together (or at least not against each other).

So you're not going to get a static IP address at home. It might *seem* to be static since it doesn't move or change often, but it can and will. I use DynDNS for my dnyamic external DNS needs. I really should do something else, but I've been lazy. As for NAT, it should be setup by default for your new Charter Spectrum setup. But only for outgoing connections. Incoming might be more difficult, but it depends on what kind of access you have to the router behind the cable modem. You said you got a Wifi device, can you post a model number? I strongly suspect it's a firewall/four port switch/wifi access point all in one. And depending on which model is is... you might have full control over it. I personally run OPNsense at home on my own hardware, and totally seperate Wifi hardware. But I'm a masochist at times. For an initial setup, what they've given you should be just fine.

http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/final.html#specsoft

What should I read?

Nothing yet, let's work on getting your new Spectrum connection working first, then you can go the next step. 1. plug you laptop into one of the ethernet ports on the new firewall. I suspect you have it cabled like this: Street ==> cable ==> cable modem --> rj45 --> wifi/router/switch So plug your laptop into the last item and see if you get assigned an IP address using DHCP. You might need to turn it on on your laptop if you have it already turned off because you do static IPs at home. Just looking to get an IP on there (also, turn OFF your laptop wifi for now) and confirm that the cable modem part is working. They might have a pre-printed wifi SSID and password on the wifi/router/switch, so you could use that info as well to get an IP address and then confirm your new cable modem is working. John

Hi Tim & Keith, On Tue, 2023-04-11 at 21:20 -0400, Tim Keller via WLUG wrote:

Though from a pure linux nerd point of view, I've come to love Linode. It's basically a cloud provider built by linux geeks. Also if you look around there are all kinds of incentives where they'll give you a 100 bucks to screw around. The other cloud provider I've tinkered with is digital ocean, as well as AWS/GCP/Oracle cloud. The pro/con of going to the cloud is they hide most of the knobs..

My personal beef with Linode and AWS/GCP is the price. I've had great success with NetCup[0] which currently runs my mail and backup servers. They're pretty cheap but I've been using them for two-three years with minimal issues. I have worked on Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr before and they're all great offerings, just a tad on the expensive side for me. -- Cara (she/her)

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"Chuck" == Chuck Anderson via WLUG writes:

On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 10:02:24PM -0400, Cara Salter via WLUG wrote:

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Hi Tim & Keith,

On Tue, 2023-04-11 at 21:20 -0400, Tim Keller via WLUG wrote:

...

Though from a pure linux nerd point of view, I've come to love Linode. It's basically a cloud provider built by linux geeks. Also if you look around there are all kinds of incentives where they'll give you a 100 bucks to screw around. The other cloud provider I've tinkered with is digital ocean, as well as AWS/GCP/Oracle cloud. The pro/con of going to the cloud is they hide most of the knobs..

My personal beef with Linode and AWS/GCP is the price. I've had great success with NetCup[0] which currently runs my mail and backup servers. They're pretty cheap but I've been using them for two-three years with minimal issues.

I have worked on Linode, DigitalOcean, and Vultr before and they're all great offerings, just a tad on the expensive side for me.

The other problem (which I have and aluded to earlier) is that @charter.net is blocking all emails from linode IP blocks. Which sucks since that's the ISP for my town, unless you're lucky enough to live on the few streets with FIOS.

If you can hold your nose, Oracle Cloud offers free forever instances. That is where the WLUG website and DNS server is running these days.

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

These are probablhy the most relevant free services you could use to replicate what you have at home now:

- 2 AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU** and 1 GB memory each

- Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as 1 VM or up to 4 VMs with 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month

** 1 OCPU on x86 CPU Architecture (AMD and Intel) = 2 vCPUs; 1 OCPU on Arm CPU Architecture (Ampere) = 1 vCPU

- 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total

- Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month

- Email Delivery: 3,000 emails sent per day

And what's the price?

This sounds like a good WLUG topic: Getting Started with the Cloud. How to open a Cloud account, install and manage Linux, IP addresses, firewall rules, etc.

I could do a talk sometime about how I use ansible to setup Linodes and some of the issues and problems I've run into while doing so.

I've no love for oracle but OCI is probably one of the better deals for a 'traditional' cloud provider. The 10TB out finally forced AWS to increase their free-tier and it's still a fraction of that at 100GB, from 1GB. Their ARM works well for my purposes but is slower than graviton, not a concern here certainly. -soup On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 10:24 PM Chuck Anderson via WLUG < wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:

On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 05:14:31PM -0400, John Stoffel wrote:

...

...

If you can hold your nose, Oracle Cloud offers free forever instances. That is where the WLUG website and DNS server is running these days.

...

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

...

These are probablhy the most relevant free services you could use to replicate what you have at home now:

And what's the price?

Free forever. _______________________________________________ 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/MCOR4C...

I would give a talk on how to set up Oracle Cloud manually--no Ansible or other automation. On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 07:59:14AM -0400, Doug Mildram via WLUG wrote:

Doug/dmildram> The free Oracle cloud setup talk sounds awesome.

I'd expect it would take quite some time, both for presenter to prepare AND maybe even for the meeting timeframe. John, I think I may get as well try to not learn what Ansible is (being less into code control, node automation, myself... though I've seen an amazing amount of interest on them on this group, then pondered how we balance the various knowledge/skill levels in wlug).

Am I right to assume that for a one-off, i.e. one personal/home user wanting free cloud storage and maybe email, that the Ansible angle should be postponed to follow a dumber/simpler?? How To talk?

--Background just to expose my mind: I was a unix sysadin for decades since 1985, but my modern skills got out of date around 2000. Fortunately for me, I lucked into working with Chuck,Frank, many others as a WPI network engineer 2010-2019. Thus, not a sysadmin any longer but just a cubicle wall away from all kinds of IT evolution via WPI. Heck, even the WPI IT sysadmins leaned a bit?more? on the brains in NetOps ! --love, doug

On Wed, Apr 12, 2023, 10:24 PM Chuck Anderson via WLUG wrote:

...

On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 05:14:31PM -0400, John Stoffel wrote:

...

...

If you can hold your nose, Oracle Cloud offers free forever instances. That is where the WLUG website and DNS server is running these days.

...

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

...

These are probablhy the most relevant free services you could use to replicate what you have at home now:

And what's the price?

Free forever.

...

...

...

...

"Chuck" == Chuck Anderson writes:

On Wed, Apr 12, 2023 at 05:14:31PM -0400, John Stoffel wrote:

...

...

If you can hold your nose, Oracle Cloud offers free forever instances. That is where the WLUG website and DNS server is running these days.

...

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

...

These are probablhy the most relevant free services you could use to replicate what you have at home now:

And what's the price?

Free forever.

With google's history of just dumping products randommly and without notice? No thanks...

So I suspect that it's not GTT that is really providing DSL but more likely Verizon. And since VZ is trying to get out of the copper business that is why your dilemma. Since your in Worcester there are not many options. Charter Business or maybe going Cell based Business. However Verizon is working to roll out Fios in the city so maybe they will get your neighborhood before your disconnected. Im not sure where your web servers are hosted but you can use some web host company. I use TurnKey Internet (Latham, NY) Best of luck John Bacon WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE Network Operations 100 Institute Road Worcester, MA | 01609-2280 508-831-5000 -----Original Message----- From: Keith Wright via WLUG Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2023 12:25 AM To: Worcester Linux Users' Group General Discussion Cc: wlug@lists.wlug.org; Keith Wright Subject: [EXT] [WLUG] I need advice on a new ISP Well, the BIG problem that I have feared so long has arrived. GTT (my ISP) sent me a letter. The letter does not mention it, but GTT has filed for bankruptcy protection. The letter is full of things that I do not fully understand, but the bottom line is: "We no longer want to do business with you. You have a few months to get a new ISP, then we will unplug the wire." It seems there is not enough money to be made by charging a monthly fee to leave everything as it is. I have had the same IPv4 address for almost exactly 20 years and a lot things depend on that. There are three domain names that point to that address. There is a name server, a mail server, and a web server. I don't know how many of those things can be kept working with a new ISP. I will spend a few days asking for advice, and then decide. I don't have much hope of keeping the IP address with a new ISP, but I would like to keep my domain names and continue to send and receive mail with addresses in those domains, and to be able to put up web pages in those domains with a minimum of censorship and advertising. I don't need the name server if there is another way of doing this. Currently, that is all done via a DSL line to my basement. It seems that the new way is to "spin up" a virtual machine in the "cloud", and run Linux and servers from there. I don't know much about that. I live in Worcester, about a mile from WPI. More details can be read here: http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/lossage.html at least for a few more months. -- 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/EUTXND...

I believe John is correct.   The issue is Verizon. Non profit which I am involved in went through this a couple years ago. We were officially not getting our DSL "service" from Verizon but it was their copper. Verizon did not even notify our ISP and just disconnected the line (in Marlboro). We of course found out when our equipment went offline. On 4/13/23 15:06, Bacon, John via WLUG wrote:

So I suspect that it's not GTT that is really providing DSL but more likely Verizon. And since VZ is trying to get out of the copper business that is why your dilemma. Since your in Worcester there are not many options. Charter Business or maybe going Cell based Business. However Verizon is working to roll out Fios in the city so maybe they will get your neighborhood before your disconnected.

Im not sure where your web servers are hosted but you can use some web host company. I use TurnKey Internet (Latham, NY)

Best of luck

John Bacon

WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE Network Operations 100 Institute Road Worcester, MA | 01609-2280 508-831-5000

-----Original Message----- From: Keith Wright via WLUG Sent: Tuesday, April 11, 2023 12:25 AM To: Worcester Linux Users' Group General Discussion Cc: wlug@lists.wlug.org; Keith Wright Subject: [EXT] [WLUG] I need advice on a new ISP

Well, the BIG problem that I have feared so long has arrived.

GTT (my ISP) sent me a letter. The letter does not mention it, but GTT has filed for bankruptcy protection.

The letter is full of things that I do not fully understand, but the bottom line is: "We no longer want to do business with you. You have a few months to get a new ISP, then we will unplug the wire."

It seems there is not enough money to be made by charging a monthly fee to leave everything as it is.

I have had the same IPv4 address for almost exactly 20 years and a lot things depend on that. There are three domain names that point to that address. There is a name server, a mail server, and a web server.

I don't know how many of those things can be kept working with a new ISP. I will spend a few days asking for advice, and then decide.

I don't have much hope of keeping the IP address with a new ISP, but I would like to keep my domain names and continue to send and receive mail with addresses in those domains, and to be able to put up web pages in those domains with a minimum of censorship and advertising. I don't need the name server if there is another way of doing this.

Currently, that is all done via a DSL line to my basement. It seems that the new way is to "spin up" a virtual machine in the "cloud", and run Linux and servers from there. I don't know much about that.

I live in Worcester, about a mile from WPI.

More details can be read here: http://www.free-comp-shop.com/none/lossage.html at least for a few more months.

-- 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/EUTXND... _______________________________________________ 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/IMJWZ4...