Moving house and Qube


I'm moving house next week, and Telecom NZ can't reconnect my DSL connection until 8 days after the move. Since I'm using this connection to host a mail server that my family relies on this is somewhat of a problem.

It's especially annoying (the late reconnection) because Telecom are running a Special Offer to attract new customers to their "Jetstream " ADSL service and the resulting new connections have consumed all available DSL servicemen until 8 days after I move house.
What ever happened to "looking after the customers you have" ? Eh !! Quite frankly this sucks.

Anyway, dwelling on poor service from monopolists will get me nowhere ... on to the problem at hand ...

It had occurred to me that a good friend of mine had a Jetstream connection and was amenable to having my Cobalt Qube sitting in his study.
I have a Static IP address to simplify running of a mail server, so it wouldn't be a simple case of relocating the server itself.

A complicating factor is that my friend and I use different ISP's. "What?" I hear you say, hadn't I mentioned that we were both on Jetstream ?
Yes, I did. There is no contradiction here. Telecom NZ has a natural monopoly , in that they own the "last mile", or local loop for all domestic telephone installations in NZ. The only form of competition to date is that ISP's can interconnect to Telecom's IPNet and can sell to their subscribers the connection to the Internet from IPNet - but all domestic subscribers, no matter what ISP they choose, must first connect to IPNet over telecom's copper wires, through telecom's DSLAM s, paying the lions share of the total fee (75%) to Telecom. This situation will hopefully change this year with Telecom offering bitsream wholesale services to competitors.

So, I'm using a different ISP than my friend, but we're both using Jetstream from Telecom NZ.
Side Note - Why I chose the ISP I did:
My ISP, Paradise , let me have a static IP at no extra charge. I had been using Telecom's own ISP, Xtra , but when I asked them for a Static IP they wanted to charge me an extra $20 per month ! I couldn't believe them. They consider a Static IP to be a "business service" - despite my protests. The ISP portion of the total broadband fees was only $20 and this already includes a Dynamic IP address - I just wanted the same one each time I powered my router on - is this worth another $20? No. So, Xtra, if you're listening - "YOU SUCK". They should be called "Less" not "Xtra" - what a sad joke their name is.
When I asked Paradise for a Static IP, they said "Why?". At last a sensible response. Thanks for asking. I told them that I wanted to host my own mail server. "Ok" they said, and "do you want us to act as your name server, and backup smtp server too - for the same $20 ISP fee?" . I just about fell off my chair. What could I say but "yes" and that's why Paradise is my ISP.

Back to my problem. I had a chat with a Paradise tech support guy. For some reason I've always found them to be knowledgeable and helpful, and this time was no exception. I understood that all the ISP's using Jetstream were all connected on IPNet, and from seeing my friend's router configuration, the only apparent config difference was in the PPPoA usernames (which include the ISP details, e.g. username@paradise.net.nz instead of friend@xtra.co.nz).
Is it possible that by just changing the login details on each of our routers that we would swap our ISP connections? Well, "yes". That's what the Paradise guy told me.
Also, my "Static IP Address" isn't really static at all - at least not in the traditional sense. It's a dynamic address, but Paradise has assigned a fixed address to my account so I always get the same one when I power up :-) This means I shouldn't have to change any router settings other than the credentials for the account.

Did it work? ... almost.

At my friends house, I put my credentials into his router and rebooted it (for some reason this particular Conextant router always reboots when you save the configuration). And ... no go. I had forgotten to turn off my own router at home so it was still logged in. Bugger! I knew I had to do this, and had thought about it earlier in the day, just forgot to do it when I left home.
Fortunately, the round trip was only 10 minutes. Once I'd powered off my router, we retried my friends router and it all worked as expected!
The correct IP had been assigned - I just needed to open the right NAT pinholes for incoming & outgoing mail, and SSH, and we're done.
We tested the mail delivery & reception - all good, except my friend can not collect his POP mail, from Xtra, from my Paradise connection. Why ? We don't know and will explore this later. Naturally, I had changed his Outlook settings to use the Paradise SMTP server, but could not explain why the POP didn't work unchanged. We forwarded his mail to an account on my Qube and changed from POP to IMAP. I think my friend will appreciate the convenience of having a local IMAP server vs a remote POP server - at least for a couple of weeks.

Back at my place, I didn't have success with connecting my router to Xtra. In preparation for this operation, my friend had changed his account password with Xtra. Unfortunately, Xtra store the actual DSL password in a different place to the main account & webmail password. We needed to call their tech support to a) learn this fact and b) get the DSL password changed.
Xtra, you suck, have I mentioned this before ?

Posted: Mon - March 28, 2005 at 07:44 PM      

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