OT: test 99

[Bill Vermillion]

When asked his whereabouts on Mon, Aug 02 19:02 , John Esak took the 
fifth, drank it, and then slurred: 

> 
> >
> > 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.

Glad it's working.

Now you need to get secondary MX set up in case those
mail.nexus.com or mail.valar.com is not reachable for ANY reason.

You can often find others who will do secondary MX for you on a
swap basis if you do it for them.

> 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.

I've seen that before.

> 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...)

If you are running your mail in house you really should make
arrangements for a secondary MX site.

>... 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...

In the last couple of weeks I saw figures that Verio had almost
200,000 FreeBSD servers, and yahoo at about 275,000.

> 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.

There are close to 11,000 ports.  A word of advice.  On some things
you will want to get the PKG from the master BSD site.   I say that
because certain things such as CVS will bring in languages to be
able to compile the package, and it can be time and space consuming
to bring those in only to compile a program.

And you don't even have to ftp the package to your machine.

Point the  pkg_add to the site and directory with the package and
install right over the network with no downloading.  You'll love the
ports.

> ... 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.

I've seen this before because some major providers just do NOT
update their DNS according to the records in the DNS entries like
they are supposed.

This fall NSI will be going to an update process that should occur
in under 10 minutes.  But that wont help when places like
RoadRunner do NOT update their DNS for days.

> 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.

AT&T isn't the only one that is slow.  RR is another.

> 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.

> 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.

That is CHEAP.

...

> 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!

That's what it should be.  

Glad you are working - finally.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com