ISP Suggestion

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Oct 26, 2009, at 1:09 PM, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:

> I hardly believe you'll find **ANY** ISP here in Israel which  
> doesn't do traffic shaping due to 2 simple reasons:
>
> 1. Bandwidth From/To Israel costs a fortune (thanks goes to Med-1),  
> add it with ..
> 2. Israel is considered a big big big piracy heaven, which means  
> whatever bandwidth ISP throws to the users, they'll consume *ALL* of  
> it, so they all use traffic shaping tricks.

Actually I want traffic shaping. I want my VoIP to work. I want my  
email. I'd like YouTube to work too, but 012 has not quite caught on  
to that.
Everything else can wait, as long as it goes through such as  
BitTorrent, http downloads of big files, etc, something else 012 has  
not quite figured out.


> I think many ISP's do block some ports like 25 (SMTP) to prevent  
> users from running spam bots from the end-user machine's.



Last spring I had a problem with Netvision randomly blocking every  
email port (smtp, pop and secure versions of them) to servers outside  
their network except for gmail and a few other well known hosts.

I compenstated two ways. The first was to move all of my mailing list  
emails to gmail, lowering the traffic on my personal account.

As an aside, it allowed me to replace mutt with Apple's mail.app,  
which has rules to get rid of emails from people I don't want them  
from, preserving my sanity. :-)

The second was to connect to my personal email provider with ssh and  
then tunnel to his mail servers.

The third was to call and complain.

When they called me back and told me that they did not block any email  
ports, I left the ssh tunnel in place, and although it is over  
complicated and annoying, it has worked 99% of the time. The first few  
times I tried to go back to regular email it did not work, but that  
may have been fixed by now.

Note that I have two internet connections here netvision and 012. I'm  
currently using 012 for the ssh tunnel (it's one of the few things  
that works well with them), but occasionaly I've had to go back to  
netvision. I got the second connection to have redundancy, one is a  
cable modem with netvision and the other is an aDSL line with 012.

One of the problems with the ssh tunnel is that the system at the  
other end uses TCP wrappers and won't allow connections from systems  
with completely broken reverse DNS servers. Ocasionally both 012 and  
netvision has had them, but moving to the other ISP fixed it. I assume  
that rebooting the router to get a fresh IP in another netblock would  
have also done it.

Geoff.

-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com