USAL log

Verizon is planning to block my outgoing port 25 by June 1. There may be some intermittent down time this weekend as I configure the judge to use port 587.

While we haven’t had the snow seen further south of here, winds last night were very high, and the server lost power for a while. I was in rainy Bermuda on business, so USAL has just come back up now. Email should process as it comes off of the queues trying to send here.

USAL is currently down.

As of 19:00, USAL is back on line.

To get away from the spam list problem, I’ve move to yet another new server. Once DNS propogates fully, I’ll switch outgoing mail away from my backup. If anyone notices any problems with the webform, please let me know. I won’t be able to test it properly for several more hours.

Sorry folks, but it looks like we ended up on the blacklists again….

I’ll see what I can do.

Interesting points from the war against spam. As noted in the earlier entry, my email provider’s IP address landed on some spam blacklists earlier this week. According to my provider, this was due to an exploited web script on one of the websites hosted on the same machine as I am. While the problem has been resolved, the fallout continues. One of the blacklists, Passive Spam Block List, allows anyone to take an IP off of its list. I did this, but two email providers for folks who play on USAL don’t seem to recognize that the IP address is no longer on the list, and they continue to block mail from USAL. The providers who are doing this are zg.t-com.hr and supanet.com.
Worse, when I tried contacting the supanet.com user through an email account that doesn’t go through the blocked IP address, I got the following bounce message:

DENIED FILTERED (A) : rejected : This message has been marked as spam due to the subject contents
and therefore has not been delivered.  If this is a legitimate message
please resend with an alternative subject, sorry for the inconvenience
: Your Subject : USAL Diplomacy Judge

Folks, please find a way to whitelist the judge’s email. I have and use alternate providers for when the problem is at my end, but I can’t help if your local spam blocking is too far over the top.

Comcast.net has my mail server on a blacklist. I’m working to resolve.

(2009-03-08 15:00) Verizon.net now blocked as well…

(2009-03-08 19:00) Comcast seems to be going through again. VZ still blocked.

(2009-03-09 05:30) We are now on spamcop blacklist. I’ll try to move us to a temporary mail server, but it may be several hours before that is working.

(2009-03-09 12:00) Outgoing mail shifted to Verizon. Please let me know if you continue to have problems. I’ll switch back to our regular host once the spam blocking issue is resolved.

(2009-03-11 13:30) Switching back to the regular server.

There may be some intermittent connection down time this weekend as I try to get the rest of my network configuration back the way it was before the FiOS install. The complicating factor is that the TV boxes have to be on the network in order to function, and they are picky about how IP addresses are served to them.

UPDATE 23:30:  Not feeling any love from the router. I hope to get basic functionality back soon.

I’m upgrading from DSL to FiOS on Friday, 2008-02-13. This will certainly require some downtime due to connectivity changing, and my need to reconfigure their router after they leave.

I am going to put in a absence for Master on all games from 05:00 Friday until 12:00 Saturday so that no new deadlines get set for Friday. I’ll also notify all masters who still have an existing Friday deadline that they ought to postpone it until the following Monday (I suspect this will just be a couple of VGNP games).

Please let me know if you see any problems!

UPDATE: The Verizon guy got here around 9:30. The downtime will likely start around noon and last for at least a few hours until I get everything configured to use the new service.

UPDATE (16:40): FiOS is up and running, but the new router won’t let me set my own network IP space. I was using 10.11.12.0/24, but the router will only do 192.168.1.0/24. I also had the judge box serving IP addresses, but I can’t do that since the TV boxes require IPs served from the router. I may try moving stuff around another time, but the goal right now is to get the judge up again.

UPDATE (19:00): I think we are up and running again. It may take a while for mail that has been queued enroute to the judge to make its way so please be patient.

The forecast for this area over the weekend is for significant wind and snow. If the judge doesn’t seem to be responding, it is likely that the power has failed.

Update [2008-12-21  19:30]:  We made most of the way through the weekend. Power now restored after about two hours of outage. Sorry for any inconvenience.