Grr. I’ve managed to get my DSL service working properly again, but it wasn’t without its hassles. My DSL provider, Aspark, apparently decided to turn on filtering of inbound connections while I was away on holidays. All inbound packets to ports < 1024 were being silently dropped upstream, effectively rendering my webserver, mail server and various other standard services utterly useless. After spending a few hours running packet traces on various other servers I have access to I was able to work this out, since Aspark didn’t actually tell me they were planning to do this, or that they’d done it.
I rang their support number on the weekend, which is when I had a few spare moments to devote to diagnosing the issue after noticing it. Of course, they don’t staff their support desk on weekends, so I left a message. I never received a return phonecall, so I rang them again and had a chat to them about what had happened. Apparently it’s their policy to not allow ‘servers’ on their Residential plans, which is what I had. I’d have to upgrade to a Business plan for it to work. This is not documented anywhere on their website or on any of the materials they sent me. I got them to change the plan quickly so I could get things running correctly again, but I’ll be following up on this with them, particularly since I’ve double checked their Terms and Conditions, etc. and there is definitely no mention of servers being verboten. I’m sure various people would be interested to hear about this kind of bait-and-switch business practice.
Loads of other stuff going on. Photos to put up, OSDC happened, Christmas parties galore, etc. More updates after the craziness subsides a bit and I get some more sleep.
Still grinning like an idiot though. :)