<Dr. Nick>Heya Everybuddy!</Dr. Nick> I managed to get on the phone with a Charter Sales Engineer and the gentleman who runs the entire head-end for northern Nevada at charter (who has been to a RLUG meetings and is a linux user to boot!). The gist of the call is as follows:
Consumer Line: The AUP for the consumer grade Internet service prohibits the hosting of servers. The network was supposed to be filtering traffic to most ports <1024. [My opinion is that someone noticed that the ACL was broken and fixed it and why we all just noticed this.] Business Line: (Static and Dynamic IP Accounts) are not supposed to filter any ports below 1024, as he says "...the whole purpose of the business account is to run a server." [If they are being filtered let me know and I'll talk with the people I now know there.] Port Filtering: (this conversation was rather protracted so this is the gist) -- a majority of the consumer line customers are not running firewalls or other network security devices. By blocking ports charter decreases the chance of stuff like code-red, nachi, etc destroying the network. [and they get to charge for people wanting to host servers on the lines] As for SSH, they say that they'll never filter ssh because that is how they manage their routers. -<>- and now back to my $0.02 on the issue: AUPs are double edged swords -- Charter has discontinued customers for violating the AUPs on spamming. By putting up a server on a consumer line a user could also be disconnected. The AUP is there to protect the user and the service provider. This is not a technical issue, it is a business issue. Now I know most of you don't actually read the Acceptable Use Policy that the ISP sends you when you sign up, however you can't really get upset at the ISP when they decide to enforce something that you agreed to when you signed up for service. In an idealistic world there would be a 'Consumer Bill of Rights that would allow you to opt out of port filtering on your consumer line or whatnot. However in this world there is only one vote the consumer has and that is where they put their money. A great example of this is Speakeasy. Speakeasy does not have a 'no server AUP", In fact they encourage folks to run servers. This is because their CEO was astute enough to understand early on that the AUPs of the larger service providers like SBC and Charter would alienate a certain segment of the consumer base that they could pick up and diligently serve. So that being said, take your money to GBIS, Speakeasy or whomever will give you an AUP you want, after-all your only vote is with your money,. Perhaps if enough people vote with their wallets Charter will change their policy. I'm also willing to bet a box of chrispy-creme that if 50 people call speakeasy this month asking for a DSLAM to be placed in the Reno area that speakeasy would do it and then you will all get unfiltered lines. We did this in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn and had speakeasy installed and serving us in two months [and their tech support sucks too] As for their technical support, I have only seen one organization with clued tier-1 tech support, and that was because I hired, trained, and managed them... Lame tech-support is something that just is, many organizations do not allocate the budget to be able to afford decent quality support folks because folks with clue tend to want to be paid for cultivating and maintaining their clue or they go elsewhere. That being said,I wish you good luck. I am staying with charter as I get great download speeds (1024Kbps) and I've had one downtime in the past two years and that was a due to a scheduled maintenance -- You cant beat the price, I pay an additional $10/month on my cable bill for 1024Kbps/128Kbps -- as I said earlier, i don't run servers at home because in my opinion consumer grade lines are not stable enough to host email, web, or other important stuff. love Chris _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
