[TriLUG] OT: Opinion about DNS service

[David Burton via TriLUG]

On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 12:13 PM, Brian via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> On 08/04/2017 11:44 AM, David Burton via TriLUG wrote:
>
>> *...[snip]...*
>
> With Time-Warner, at least, you could keep the same IP address for many
>> months, if your modem stayed powered-on. In fact, you'd usually keep it
>> even through a modem power-cycle.
>>
>
> Also true.
>
> What you haven't outright said is "why do you have business class?" I'll
> answer that implied question now in two words:
>
> Port blocking.
>
> Commonly-abused ports (like 25) /might/ not be blocked at any moment with
> residential class.  I can be /guaranteed/ they aren't blocked with business
> class.
>

Well, I gave up on running my own mailserver, anyhow. It was just too *hard*,
largely due to the spam flood.

It is so hard to do email properly that AT&T gave up, and outsourced the
chore to Yahoo (which is now awkward, since Yahoo is now owned by Verizon).

Also, these days most big mail providers won't accept connections from
mailservers running on residential / dynamic IP addresses. The problem is
not that Spectrum or AT&T will block your ports, it is that nobody else
will talk to them.

These days all I run is a web server. For my web server, on port 80, it
hasn't been a problem. Nobody seems to block port 80, and I assume they
don't block port 443, either (I'm not currently doing https).

When Spectrum/TWC went down for 42 hours, a week ago, I temporarily used my
neighbor's AT&T (with his permission). I connected to his WiFi with my
Win10 laptop, enabled ICS (Internet Connection Sharing), ran an Ethernet
cable from the laptop to the gazinta port on my router, forwarded port 80
from his modem to my laptop, and from my laptop to the router, changed my
ZoneEdit settings to direct traffic to my neighbor's IP, and my sites were
back up.

It had three (3) levels of NAT going on, and it felt a lot like it was held
together with duct tape and bailing wire, but it worked.

(And now I know for sure that AT&T doesn't block port 80, either.)



> Now, the reality might be that, say, a Linode VPS is cheaper per year, and
> that I could do everything I currently do physically in my house on such a
> system.  But I like having the hardware in front of me.  I can use and
> abuse it however I want and there's nobody to complain but me.
>

Me too!



>
> On the IPv6 front: Apparently it comes and goes.  A month or so ago it was
> working; this past week it inexplicably stopped and I had to set up
> tunneling again.
>

I'm not using IPv6 yet, because my router is one small hardware rev short
of the version with IPv6 support.



>
> Oh, and the best thing about business class:  I call for support and get a
> person that actually knows something.  Just the other day I called to
> report an outage, and the conversation went something like this:
>
>
> Me: "Yeah, I just lost connectivity to my remote site.  Can you check
> stuff?"
>
> Him: "I am showing your modem is offline.  Can you check the lights on the
> front and cycle power?"
>
> Me: "Nope, I'm not on site at the moment."
>
> Him: "Well let me do a deeper check, hold on..."
>
> ...a couple minutes pass...
>
> Him: "Huh.  Looks like 12 out of 13 business class modems in that sector
> are offline.  Let me get our guys working on that."
>
>
> I defy you to get that level of service on a residential contract.
>
> -B


Now that is a *very* good point.

When my Spectrum/TWC went down during the thunderstorm, a few minutes after
5 pm, one week ago, their support people kept saying, "we don't show an
outage in your area."

They said that over 85% of the modems on my "node" (whatever that is) were
up and running, which they said was normal, and they don't "declare an
outage" unless it drops below 70%. I asked whether my neighbors on my
street were up, and they couldn't tell me. I asked how many modems are on
my "node" and they said "305," so it must be a big "node!"

I went to their office and rented a modem, and thereby proved that the
problem wasn't my (customer-owned) modem.

I surveyed a couple of my neighbors on my street, and determined that
service was out for them, too.

But Spectrum wouldn't believe me that it was an area outage, so they
scheduled a service call for Monday (three days out). Ugh!

One of my neighbors beat 'em up and got 'em to schedule a service call for
the next day (Saturday), but then they called her back and postponed it
until Sunday.

They finally fixed it on Sunday morning, though there's now an unburied
wire running along the curb, so I won't be surprised if we have another
brief outage when they get around to burying it.

Dave
www.sealevel.info  <== *can you tell that this is running on an ancient IBM
repurposed XP computer at the end of a cablemodem wire?*