David and Katherine Goodwin

Pale Purple is moving office tomorrow; as part of this I obviously had to sort out a new telephone and broadband etc. BT were for once quite quick in doing "stuff", and likewise BeThere seemed fairly quick...

However, on Tuesday our broadband at work died. This was not good. After half an hour on the phone, BeThere finally told me that they'd changed me from a static IP address to a dynamic IP address. Without telling me this beforehand! This means :

1. It's a pain connecting to customers servers now - as most of them only allow specific IP addresses in
2. I've got some DNS updates to do, so people can connect to us
3. I now can't connect to my mail server on port 25 to relay stuff out...

Of course, I had forgotten about their port 25 restriction, and mail was just queuing up locally on our office mailserver waiting to go out. Thankfully a customer rang, and the conversation implied they'd not received any mail from us...... oh... err... 'mailq'.... poo.

This was solved by using the following IPTables command on our office router (an elderly PC); obviously it requires the external mail server listens on port 2525 -

"iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp -d mail.server.ip.addr --dport 25 -j DNAT --to-destination mail.server.ip.addr:2525"

Grumble, grumble, grumble. In all other aspects BeThere have been brilliant - their network doesn't seem to slow down noticeably in the evening, and we've had very few outages.

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