Further musings ...

[tyggerjai]

Having picked the brains of our network guys - who unanimously said "Internode" as soon as I said "So, tell me about ADSL ....".
I pointed out that Internode don't offer a static IP, and they said "Well, you could run a server at home. But you work for, effectively, an ISP with a phat pipe that offers employees cut-rate hosting."

Oh yeah :)
And our staff rates for hosting are, in fact, very competitive.

And they reckon the draytek vigor is well hard enough for home usage in terms of security/NAT foo, so that saves the electricity for both the web/mail server and the firewall box, in exchange for a small per-megabyte traffic charge on a box that will probably get bugger all traffic.

Swings, roundabouts. Just when I'd decided to go with TPG, too :)

Ah well.

Internode folks - how often has your dynamic IP actually been changing?
And the drayteks do have an integrated dyndns management client, so maybe even the dynamic IP wouldn't be such a hassle...

sol.
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Comments

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I can't remember when my IP last changed, though I'm sure it has at some point. I was using dyndns for a while, but they kept expiring my record because I had the system rigged to only update when the IP changed...

As to servers-at-home, I figure that the cost of getting both a static IP and a reputable ISP in one package is such that it really isn't worth it. Hosting is pretty cheap, even if you don't work for myinternet.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

*nodnod*
It's really a kneejerk reaction to being charged for traffic, since telstra have been shafting me for traffic for a while. So the whole point of ADSL was unlimited traffi, which made me averse to paying for traffic for anything. But if the price per meg is reasonable, and applies only to the server foo (so we can run apt-get dist upgrade, or cvsup, or play quake online as much as we like at home without that affecting traffic charges), and if it's only for downstream traffic to the server (which means I can throw moomin on the box and not have to worry about how many people download it), then I can pretty easily track and restrict the server traffic. Given that I've been running the mail server at home for years with a dynamic IP, the static is kind of a bonus :)

sol.
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[hasimir.livejournal.com]

Internode is good and I understand the response, Simon Hackett runs a very nice ISP.

The proper answer to your question, however, is iiNet. That'll give you your flat rates (with traffic shaping that still beats ISDN if you go over your limit) or charged excess and you can have static IPs too.

Nope. Never. No

[subtle-eye.livejournal.com]

iiNet tookover a local ACT ISP. 3 months later the in-addr.arpa delegations on address space they now control was still busted.
Busted as in, they turned off the old authoritative DNS without migration.

Would you *really* want to do business with these people?

Re: Nope. Never. No

[hasimir.livejournal.com]

Interesting, this is the first I've heard of such a major screw up by them. Normally they've been pretty on the ball in my experience.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Yeah, having unlimited for home is the key thing -- mail is usually a pretty minor part of the total, so it's worth putting up with volume charges to put that on a nice fat reliable pipe.

FWIW, if I weren't a TINHO member I'd be looking at buying a JohnCompanies virtual server to share between a few people. They've been very fast and reliable, and the rates are reasonable. Their hardware/connectivity is far better than anything I'm going to be able to buy for myself.

As to doing mail on dynamic IP... *shudder*. I've thought about doing it from time to time, but could only see it working out if it were via UUCP with a stable host somewhere out on the 'net.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

You want to be confident that:
1) The next person to get your IP isn't running a mail server. (then you get hard bounces at best, and someone else reads your email at worst)
2) Your secondary will cope.

I've had a couple of IP change outages for email, and the lag is generally about a day from me discovering and changing to mail getting back through, subject to DNS TTLs, etc. So it's not *that* bad, unless you consider 24 hours without mail that bad. Which I do, hence the move to static :)

And yeah, time to throw a box in a colo. I'm leery of doing the "rack in the corner of nigel's office" thing, mostly because myinternet have a solid, commercial style agreement so they know what the costs are and how they're recovering them, and they do this for aliving, so I know the traffic stuff is accurate, and they're not going to get a month in and say "Shit - power bill. Um ... how do we work that out?". No offense to the tentacles, but I can afford to err on the side of "pay a little more for an airconditioned pro. data center with all the kinks ironed out.". And it's only a good deal because I'm an employee.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I'm not willing to run either of the risks you mention when it comes to mail. Admittedly there's the (small) risk of DNS hijacking whatever you do given that there's no real authentication going on with SMTP, but I find that easier to cope with than mail possibly winding up on some random luser's machine.

TINHO isn't at the Tentacle end of things. We own machines colo'd in New York and Amsterdam, in real proper facilities. Main problem right now is that it's all volunteer (the colo facilities aren't of course, I mean sysadmin on the boxes) so things tend to be a bit slow. At least I have root on 'em.

I ceased to be terribly impressed by the Tentacle approach back when it was still Netizen, but I don't talk about that a lot as it seems liable to cause offense. At some point I switched from being cowboy-ISP-sysadmin to process-Nazi-sysadmin.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The move to VicNet marked the end of my real association with it - I don't think I ever actually had a machine in the vicnet rack, from memory.

I can fully see the attractions of the cowboy approach, but it's a trade-off, and it's important to be aware of the trade-offs. And yeah, for me personally, the trade-off isn't currently worth it. For other people it is. I can especially see the attraction if you're running a service like Vurt, where users don't pay but have skillz and a certain amount of dedication - if you're time rich and cash poor, it makes a lot of sense. On the downside, there's a risk to relationships of things not being properly scoped and specced out. *shrug*

sol.
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[kitling.livejournal.com]

This is me not saying anything about what I think of the rack in the front room.... but quietly agreeing with Jai.

Although if vurt.net wasn't getting free hosting it most likely would not exist.

[hasimir.livejournal.com]

The ISP I used to work for have always offered UUCP (under the marketing name of "Secure Mail"). Well, they did around a year or so ago when I left, they might have finally culled it along with the ISMTP service.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

CCA, by any chance? They're the one major I can remember still offering UUCP in the late 90s, though I'd moved into the telco world by then and may have missed one.

[hasimir.livejournal.com]

Yup, it was indeed CCA.

[ms-kismet.livejournal.com]

The other mob to look at is swiftdsl (http://www.swiftdsl.com.au) they've just modified their plans and are still competitive with InterNode (you only need to look at whirlpool forums to see that). You get a static IP and I believe that the going rates are around about the same on the different speeds.

I'd suggest a quick run through the whirlpool comparison guide either way just to make sure before you commit though.

And the fact that we went with Swiftdsl a month or so ago has nothing to do with my post... infact about a month ago, Internode's pricing wasn't quite as good as swift....