The Screaming Viking

My hosting provider is -really- irritating me.  Myself and a couple of other users have seen the “connection dropped by imap server” errors for some time now.  I contacted the web host about it, and they promptly advised me they see no issues on the server.  Lovely…there is an error with no issues or error logs?  Not sure what kind of systems they run, but if I didn’t have a log of an error I’d think that in and of itself is a freekin problem.  After I notified them and they told me there were “no problems”, suddenly the problems disappeared.  I’ve worked in I.T. long enough to know that you don’t always want to tell or admit to the user that there was/is a problem.  Fine, I get that.  I don’t care what the problem is…I fix enough problems on a daily basis that I have no interest in sticking my nose in their business…but get the damn thing working.  I am paying some for this service…it’s not much, but still.

Things go along fine for a little bit…then I decide I want to convert from gallery2 to gallery3 for my online picture stuff.  Gallery 3 has it’s own conversion process…but it’s going to take quite some time.  Fine, whatever…I get about 3/4 of the way through the process (7ish hours) and the hosting provider sends me a nastygram about too much load on the box.  I let them know what I’m doing and they back off for a while.  Oddly enough…at this time, the IMAP issue popped up a couple more times.  I finish the conversion and the IMAP errors go away, interesting.

Today, I’m getting the IMAP error over the noon hour….I’ve had quite enough.  I liked being able to setup my own email and tinker with things, I think it’s part of what got me the job I have today…but I’m tired of dealing with the problems.  I would recommend all users transition over into some free email site (I’ll be using google) and inform people that the techno accounts are being retired.  I have no plans to discontinue techno email per se…I’m just not going to put any time and effort in to trying to find out why it isn’t working from day to day.  Also, it’s kind of annoying that techno gets randomly bounced from places because it’s a microscopic email server that some places seem to discard as spam.

If you would like your techno email forwarded to another account, LMK and I’ll put in the forwarders.  Right now, my hosting provider will not allow forwarding to the following domains:

• - Yahoo!
• - Hotmail
• - AT&T
• - AOL
• - MSN

It will allow forwarding to gmail, which I’ve setup and tested for my own account.  It works well.

I’m still going to maintain the blog and so forth here, the easiest way to keep up to date with what is posted is to grab the RSS feed.

I carved out some time last night to setup the home network a little more to my liking.  I wanted to take the linksys wrt54g out of the equation as far as dhcp and dns are concerned.  A port failed on the router not too long ago, so I’m not sure exactly how much life is left in the old hog.  It seems like I’ve had this thing forever, I bought it not too long after the hacked firmware came out for it and it was demonstrated just what this little device was capable of.  I’m not even sure how long ago that was…I think I was in fargo at the time, I’m not sure.  6ish years ago?  I have been thinking for awhile that I should off load all of that on to the firewall and let this little device just handle wireless AP duties.

When I first setup the smoothwall it was pretty simple to get the DHCP server working fine, the problem is the internal DNS.  The smoothwall does not update it’s hosts file from the dhcp.leases file…or something like that.  There is another tab that lets you set static DNS assignments.  I added a host to this tab, saved everything out…nothing.  My internal linux server would not resolve the name.  Everything external worked fine…it was just the internal crap.  I jacked into the smoothwall host and that machine resolved the host I added without problems.  Back to the linux server..nslookup {hostname}, boom digs it out fine.  Ping {hostname} fail…wtf?  The host I added was a linux box so I tried to ssh in to it via host name…nothing.  Ssh via IP works fine…this is weird.  I’ve mentioned before if there is one part of my game that needs help the most in my daily work it’s the networking side…I just don’t know as much about it as I would like to. Read the rest of this entry »