domain (especially email) hosting from home

[Fred of Hydranuke]

This is off the topic of this thread, somewhat, but gets back on further down.

On Friday 15 July 2005 12:30, Bill McGonigle wrote:
...
> But... the warning on the Postfix website remains - allegedly due to
> some bitter feelings over the situations years ago.  Ah, OSS politics.

I use sendmail extensively, mainly for legacy reasons. I once looked into 
switching to another MTA, but was put off when I found that the claim of 
being a "drop-in replacement for Sendmail" was not exactly the case. Mainly, 
there was not a clear way to port or use the Sendmail configuration files 
such as virtusertable. And I have no desire to redo all those settings by 
hand -- or write a script to convert them, either.

Is there a "conversion kit" or similar available to convert Sendmail's 
standard config files to, say, Postfix?

And am I correct in assuming that Postfix, Exim, and most other MTAs will 
integrate well with Procmail? Since I make heavy use of Procmail recipies, it 
would be a no go for me if that were not the case.

*****************

Back to the topic, as far as hosting from your home through, I assume, a 
cablemodem service, one thing you want to be aware of is that the IP you are 
normally assigned is *dynamic* unless you request a static IP, and most 
providers will not probably do that for you unless you upgrade to "business 
class", read, more money.

Having said that, your "dyanamic" IP will stay pretty static as long as the 
MAC address of whatever is attached to your cable modem stays the same. 
Change that MAC address and you'll be assigned a new IP address.

On some services it may be tied to the MAC address of the cable modem itself, 
so inquire.

Also another nasty cavet about the dynamic IPs -- any email going to aol.com 
and a few other domains AOL owns, like Compuserve's domains, will be 
*rejected* out of hand. I've contacted AOL about this countless times and 
they will not relent. Since some of my clients have AOL addresses, I was 
forced to change my configuration. Bah.

There is a way around this if you configure your MTA to route the outgoing 
email through either your provider's MTA or another one sitting on a static 
IP address somewhere. But then, that defeats the purpose of doing all of this 
at home. :-(

With my partticular setup, I send all the email out through my dedicated 
servers, and encrypt the connections to them (TLS or SSL), so no one at 
Comcast or Adelphia can snoop on my email. Yes, I'm paranoid that way. And in 
these days where email packet sniffers -- Carnivore, for instance -- may be 
in place without my knowledge, perhaps I'm not so paranoid after all.

Also, I've read something really disturbing recently that major players like 
Yahoo may be required to keep a copy of all email and other traffic for 30 
days. Homeland Insecurity stuff. Something to stay abreast of. Encrypt, 
encrypt, encrypt. It would be sweet if everyone would use GPG. Oh well.

-- 
-Fred of Hydranuke.com
 http://www.Hydranuke.com 603-557-5986
 Whatever you want, we'll make it happen.