Looking for a New ISP

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

Speakeasy is planning to be acquired by Best Buy sometime next year. Speakeasy has been far from perfect in the 5 years or so I’ve had it (roughly since Northpoint went under). However, it’s usually been adequate, which is more than I can say for most ISPs. That’s why I’ve been willing to pay more for the service. It’s hard to believe simple competence will continue under Best Buy. (Just consider what a Best Buy acquisition did to the Geek Squad.)

Any other suggestions for quality ISP service? I’m currently paying about $120 a month for SpeakEasy. Perhaps I should just combine a couple of different low cost ISPs (e.g. Verizon and Cablevision) along with a hosting package at DreamHost or some such. Probably wouldn’t cost any more and would provide some level of redundancy for the inevitable outages.

DNS Issues

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

The name servers from EasyDNS seem to be having problems, and as a result lookups into the elharo.com domain are timing out or failing completely. Usually trying again in a minute seems to cure the problem. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’ll open a trouble ticket.

Update: EasyDNS tells me they were the target of a denial of service attack today. Should be fine now.

Looking for a Router

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

This site is currently served by an ADSL line in my apartment as are several others I maintain. I recently noticed that my NAT/router/firewall device (a D-Link Airplus extreme-G Router) can’t map multiple IPs. That is, it forwards all port 80 requests to the same system. It can’t send requests for different external IP addresses to different internal IP addresses. This means I can only run one physical HTTP server.

Would anyone care to recomend a slightly more capable NAT? I don’t need anything fancy or complicated. I’ve been relatively happy with the D-Link. Essentially I’d just want more one feature, full many-to-many port forwarding. otherwise I still want an integrated box that acts as a firewall, NAT, gigabit Ethernet router, and wireless router in one.