Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything
offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail
message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions,
mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of
others. This is my contribution to the survival of
the online community.
-- Roger Ebert, Boulder Colorado 1996
Anyone who's been trying to reach the Web or email servers for the past week-and-a-half is aware that we've been offline. Here's why:
(This part is now historical.)
Our upstream ISP, SpiritOne, handles IP address assignments and technical issues; however, we have to rely on Verizon to provide the physical connection and raw bandwidth. Some time in September, Verizon started a rollout of FIOS (a fiber-optic Internet connection service) to our area, which would be great, except they won't allow us to continue using SpiritOne as our ISP if we switch to FIOS. At the time of the rollout, we had a stable and reliable connection at 3 Mbps downstream and 768k upstream. Within hours of the FIOS rollout announcement, that connection became highly unstable and unreliable. After exhausting all technical support channels, we asked our ISP to reduce the speed to 1.5 Mbps down/384k up, and for a while that seemed to solved the stability and reliability problems, at the cost of speed.
However, within the past couple of weeks, the usable speed has gradually decayed, to the point that we are now getting a little over 1 MBps downstream, and between 50 and 120 kbps upstream - and that upstream speed is what determines how fast you can get Web pages from our server. As a comparison, a normal "56k" modem can deliver 51k on a regular basis, so right now, we are paying for approximately 7 and a half times the speed we are actually getting. SpiritOne is unable to do anything about it, because the problem is within Verizon's physical network. Verizon, of course, denies that they have done anything to cause this problem, and refuses to try to fix it.
So, to solve the problem we are going to locate a small server in another facility which will handle relaying email for us, and convert our connection here to FIOS - and the promised speed, for half of what we are currently paying, is 15 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up, or 16 times the speed we are currently paying for, and 120 times the speed we are actually getting.
Please bear with us; this changeover will still require another couple of weeks. We expect it to be completed no later than the end of December 2006, and hopefully before the 15th.
UPDATE: 1 December 2006
SpiritOne has apparently used small words to explain to Verizon that they are the problem. As of this morning, our line speed is closer to 350 kbps (we're paying for 384 k, but at this point, I'm happy enough to be above 256).
The move will proceed on schedule. UPDATE: 15 January 2007
Verizon installers have been around the outside of the house all day, running the fiber-optic line up to where the demark will be. We have an "appointment" (meaning: The installer may show up at any time in the 4-hour window from 8:30 AM 12:30 PM) for tomorrow to get the actual FiOS connection finished. Based on past performance, I expect total chaos, and a complete loss of Internet connectivity for several hours. UPDATE: 9 February 2007
Hopefully the final update. The FiOS was installed on 23 January. Incoming Web traffic was blocked by Verizon; we ordered an upgrade to "business class" service. That took place on 2 February. Unfortunately, Verizon decided to switch our DSL line from copper to fibre on 29 January, effectively putting us out of business. We had specifically told them *not* to do that, repeatedly and in very small words, so that even an idiot could have understood that it was a Bad Thing To Do. The "business class" service was turned on later the same day - but incoming Web traffic was still blocked. We then ordered another "upgrade" to "business class with static IP assignments." That was finally done in the evening on 7 February, 2007. We have now had about 48 hours of connectivity on the new fibre-optic lines. The speed is obviously a lot faster, both on downloads from this site and uploads to it. Since there are no copper lines to corrode, nor to pick up interference from radio transmitters, electro-magnetic pulses caused by nuclear wars, or whatever, stability should be very good. In addition, we have added a new UPS ("battery backup" to you non-geeks out there) to keep the server running through short power outages, and protect it from power line surges.
And we were only offline for a week and a half, thanks to Verizon's malicious disruption of the service we were obtaining from a third party ISP, in competition with Verizon. I spoke to dozens of people at Verizon during that time, and of all of them, exactly two did what I thought was their best to help; "Jim" in the Beaverton/Tigard district, and his assistant(?), "Steve." Thanks go out to those two guys, and to a tech in the California fiber operations center, whose name I didn't write down; and a big, fat, wet raspberry to the rest of Verizon. May you experience the kind of "support" I got from you the next time your income is in peril. May you learn first-hand that "bait-and-switch" is a despicable marketing tactic.
The following countries have been permanently blocked at the firewall because of long-running malicious attacks, and a complete lack of legitimate traffic:
China
Korea
Nigeria
Romania
Turkey
Subject: The myth of blocklists affecting "innocents"
From: Marc Bissonnette
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 22:55:15 -0500
Recently, the spew level has risen to industrial manure holding tank
levels with a few ko0ks and a few wannako0ks waxing prolific about how
blocklists affect completely "innocent" people and that targeting those
who support spam-friendly ISPs is unfair.
Allow me to make a comparison. Since these zealots are bandying the term
"terrorist" about, I think this is a particularly apt one:
Hamas and Hizballah are two organizations that have a couple of things in
common: Yes, they both use suicide bombers against civilian targets, yes,
they both promote hatred against anyone who isn't moslem, yes, they use
terror as a weapon that, ironically, ends up killing more moslems than
non-moslems, but they also have another thing in common:
They're both two of the most effective charity groups in their respective
regions. They hand out schoolbooks, they help rebuild war-lost homes,
they provide for the needy, they give out food, they help kids get an
education. Nice bunch of folks, eh ?
Now, let's be completely fair: There are people within both Hamas and
Hizballah that have never fired a shot in anger, think Americans are
ordinary people, just like them, and would never even contemplate suicide
as a means to an end. Nice people, truly.
That does not change the fact that the organizations that they work for
promote and excercise terror tactics that affect hundreds of thousands of
their own people around them.
If you haven't made the analogy connection between Hamas and Hizballah
and spam-friendly ISPs, hang in there, I'm getting to it.
Some people look at those in the Lebanon and Palestine who have been
affected by the war(s) and feel genuine compassion for them: Deserved
compassion. So they decide they're going to put their money where their
mouth is and donate to Hamas or Hizballah so they can give out more food,
blankets, school texts and roofs for the homeless. Pretty nice of them.
Intentions are good, right ? Yep, they are.
But: (Here comes the similarity); For every $10 you donate to Hamas for,
say, tooth brushes, that's $10 that they can now spend on grenades,
bullets, TNT, C4, or katyusha components. For every $10 you spend on an
ISP that refuses to remove spammers from their networks, that's $10 more
of bandwidth being used to send millions of spam messages.
Is the little old lady who's spending $10 a month on a dial-up account to
email her grand kids and check recipes a spammer ? No, but her $10 to a
spam-friendly ISP is most certainly allowing millions of spam messages to
propagate. With many hosting accounts at $10 a month, allowing 5 gigs a
month of transfer, that's *billions* of spam messages going out.
_That_ is why spending money on a spam-friendly ISP doesn't buy you a
free pass out of the blocklists. Move ISPs if you're in a blocklist or
work with your ISP to convince them that they _need_ to take appropriate
measures when it comes to UCE and UBE.
--
Marc Bissonnette
Looking for a new ISP? http://www.canadianisp.com
Largest ISP comparison site across Canada.
In order to make our services a little more understandable, we've updated the "available services" page to explicitly state "smarthosting" and "store-and-forward" email services.
