[Discuss] Local ISP Recommendations?

[hag at linnaean.org (Daniel Hagerty)]

David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> writes:

> I'm getting now.  In researching it though, about half the articles
> say it should be fine, and half the articles point out how it's super
> dangerous and you can end up having your mail sent to someone else's
> server if your IP address gets assigned to them.
>
> I would love to get your opinions (or even better, facts) on how
> dangerous it would be to run a web and mail server on a dynamic IP. I
> think Matt was asking about that too.

    <Raises hand>

    Way, way back when I was on comcast residential service (Oct 13,
2001 to be precise), I had a mail server hanging off my dynamic address.
Delightfully, comcast managed to blow away their DHCP database one
night.  It made the globe, being a wide area outage, which was
"mistakenly" reported as an act of god kind of thing.

Anyway:

A) The guy who got my previous address had an SMTP server that, as near
as I could tell, would blackhole incoming mail.

B) The guy who had held what was now my legitimate dhcp address was
paying no attention to dhcp, so that I had to outrace his arp replies
(knocking him off the net) to get my machine online with what was now
*my* address to change my dns records and successfully sink mail rather
than lose it.

Great fun!  Your luck will probably be better than that, but there you
go.


    I spent 3/4 of a decade on speakeasy after that, but they went
noticeably down hill after being acquired a time or three.


    I am now on comcast business service (the only viable option) and,
despite the experience above, have noting but good to say about it
(knock on copper).  Outages are few, static address is cheap enough, and
the few times I've dealt with tech support, it's been tolerable, and in
new hampshire.  I'm a quarter mile from one of media one's original head
ends, so that may count for a lot.