OT: test 99

[John Esak]

>
> You aren't being black-listed here.

Bill,
Thanks so much for your help... It all is almost too much to explain..
For this tiny problem, though, yes, I was/am actually being blacklisted. The
email from celestial.com states it implicitly "blacklisted".  Bill C. told
me that it is because he does secondary MX for some other server he supports
in some other state and they are blacklisting some particular guy... who
happens to be using smtp.ha.pts.net  which is what I come through for my
mail out of PA. I think he can/did/will fix this for me.  In any case, rDNS
will be set up by ptd.net (PenTeleData) for me right away.  I had fixed up
nexus and valar and now my own home machines are last to get done properly.
Thanks.

Now as the big story. I got right down to the wire with Rapidsite... Sheesh,
it was amazing... client for nearly 13 years I think and still so much
hassle and non-help. They tried, but just didn't get it. They said they will
be implementing a full spam system within the month, even giving dates...
but we were down... I mean getting mail 6-8-12 hours late... every single
message, every single time. Big trouble. Finally, just as I was about to
press the button to hand this to our legal dept and say, they've just stop
communicating... one of them (thank goodness) mentioned that if I wanted to,
could migrate my accounts to ViaVerio VPS Virtual Public Server type
accounts. Unbelievable. I took the plunge. Several people off line were
willing to help me bring our mail in house and set up all that that
entails... (thanks Jeremy and Sid and all...)  but I needed this quick and I
needed it sure and triple backed up, etc. So, after one day of mis-stepping.
Verio got me set up as a new dealer and I established a couple new accounts.
These are full-blown virtual servers, with a really fantastic GUI-WEB
interface that does it all... but better yet, I have full shell access to
the FreeBSD system itself. I can install anything I want. There is unlimited
mail users, unlimited transfer bytes... 1.25Gb of storage to start with...
and just about every service known to man, including everything... What
isn't there and ready to install is in a devel directory and what isn't
there I suppose is on freebsd.org/ports.  Anyway this VPS lets me sell www.
and mail support to anyone and put it on my server... all with their own
access, set off directories, shell access, logins, etc., etc., of their own.

Like I said I bit the bullet and did the move. Got with Network Solutions
and moved my DNS and MX records, etc. Moved two gigantic websites and a
couple of other smaller ones. Re-did the 50 users we have on mail, aliases
and everything... (a new thing for me called VIRTMAPS) let me do everything
really easily and I can do it all either with vi or a gui tool... which is
outstanding for my visual problems. I labored for hours (at my new crawling
speed...) and held my breath. I kept checking the nslookup of my sites to
see when they changed over. Finally, some started to move. At some sites
around the country the new DNS entries kicked in and things were fine. At
others the propagation took longer. At AT&T in NJ, the propagation just
simply didn't happen! It was 12 hours after all sites I have access to
around the country were happily seeing the right thing... they weren't. Good
God. I would do a dig of the site and it would be wrong... but I would do a
dig of the site specifically for MX records and that part would be right.
Finally, I just deposited some different resolvers from a system in PA to
the one in NJ and all was fine.  Today, I put the old resolves back and they
finally work. What, does AT&T pay the least for airplane de-icing??
Unbelievable.

Finally, it's all up and running... happily, only two days after I really
started... and on the weekend too! This made it pretty easy.

Now, I'm just compiling things the new site didn't have like php and a
library type thing called "pear"... plus a few other goodies that let my
sites work correctly. It is so great to have both web access _and_ shell
access. I haven't done much through the web interface, but it is SO much
slicker and powerful compared to Rapidsite. I shot off some email to NTT and
Verio kind of suggesting they just jettison that whole group and move on to
what is obviously superior technology (and people really...).

Eventually, I'll probably move this stuff indoors some day. For now, though
I like the fact that I don't have to keep a server up 24/7/60/60 just to
ensure I don't lose a thing... even with secondary, etc. I'm not up to that
yet.  and this new system is SO cool.

The whole thing, getting to add (and essentially sell) as many accounts as
you want on your own VPS is very, very cool. I wish I had known about this
earlier. Must have had my head in the sand because I never had any problems
before. Anyway, the whole shebang is only $95 per month. Unbelievable.

Well, that's where we are now... fixed... thanks so much for your help and
explanations... not only you Bill, but also Jay's description of secondary
MX was fantastic. Goes in my keeper file... tnx.

John

P.S. - By the way, Three days ago if I were on "guru" in PA and sent a piece
of mail to "npi" in NJ... it would take almost exactly 8 hours to get there.
Now, I send the mail, switch screens to npi and look in my mailbox and the
message is there already... like 3 or 4 seconds!!!! Back to normal... Thank
God!