[ale] State of play re home Internet with static IP

[DJ-Pfulio]

Because we can. I don't want my email sitting on someone else's
computer, in someone else's building, at the end of someone else's network.

I'd ask why don't you run your own email if you care anything about
privacy rights, but if you haven't been doing it for decades, it might
be too much trouble.  And I see you have a gmail address .... we all
have priorities in life, I suppose.

Dynamic IPs are rejected by pretty much all email servers world-wide, so
your gateway needs a static IP at a minimum.  $5/month for a VPS is more
than enough to host a few small family sites and the email gateway.

Use a VPN to access internal LAN content and Plex for streaming stuff,
photos, music, books, etc.

Actually, we don't need static IPs to have email inside our castles, if
we setup an email gateway on a VPS outside. Think store and forward.
The gateway doesn't really have any data 99.9999999% of the time, but if
the home link goes down, then that VPS in a real data center will keep
receiving email. But have the real email server inside the castle. If
you are crazy paranoid, burn down the GW weekly and rebuild it to flush
and left over state secrets that weren't gpg protected. ;)

Running small home web servers is fine according to AT&T. I asked a few
weeks ago.  They also were good with my running a VPN server, though I'm
not certain the guy understood what that meant. They provide 5 static
IPs if you ask for $10-$15/month.

I've been with Comcast Biz for almost a decade now. It is slow AND
expensive. They bumped up the price another $2 in January.  TV cannot
run over the same physical COAX as business Internet. Something about
residential TV restrictions. That means the TV COAX and ISP COAX with
Comcast will be separate.

I had Comcast's phone service for a few months. Seems they scheduled an
outage every Thursday afternoon at 2pm. Which was exactly the time that
I had a weekly call with the corporate CEO.  I moved to VOIP.ms about 8
yrs ago and never looked back, $4.95/month. I'd been using VoIP with
different services since 2002. Before moving to voip.ms, there was
always some issue with the service.

I dropped CATV in 2012, post-Olympics. Life adjusts. They never had
coverage of my sport anyways, so I didn't feel like I was missing
anything, though some BBC shows have been missed, APV has them with a 6
month delay, which is fine.  My attic antennas get 90+ stations now,
which is 60 more than I want. If you are a US Sports fan, I think CATV
is the only option, though SlingTV might work for many.

Not getting the 24-hr news stations makes me a saner human.

If you want a longer conversation about this stuff - come to any Sunday
ALE meetup. That applies to anyone, but especially Jeff.


On 3/4/19 10:05 PM, dev null zero two via Ale wrote:
> a couple dumb questions:
> 
> why do y'all host email at home other than for learning / lab purposes?
> 
> why do y'all need static IPs aside from email server purposes when
> dynamic dns works so well nowadays with cloudflare for instance?
> 
> most next gen firewalls can take DNS in place of IPs for ACLs and rarely
> does any commercial internet facing service have just one IP address in
> any case (anycast, load balancing, etc)
> 
> On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 9:58 PM Jeremy T. Bouse via Ale <ale at ale.org
> <mailto:ale at ale.org>> wrote:
> 
>     I just dumped my Comcast Business Internet and Comcast Residential
>     Cable service at the first of the year. At that time Comcast was
>     raising the rate on the monthly router lease which I only
>     begrudgingly got because they said that was the only way I could get
>     a /29 static subnet so I was paying for the 50/10 internet service,
>     the modem and the static IP block. I went with AT&T GigaPower fiber.
>     I'm getting 995/956 as of my last speed test yesterday.  So to
>     address Joey's comment about it not being fiber to the side of the
>     house, I can claim with 100% certainty that I have fiber all the way
>     into my second story room where my router sits as I watched the tech
>     run the fiber up to the box and plug it all up. Then again the ADSL
>     service I had years ago before going with Comcast was delivered over
>     fiber to the beige box in my neighbors yard across the street where
>     it went from the ONC to copper to the side of my house, but in the
>     past couple years AT& brought the fiber the last 25-50yards give or
>     take to the side of the house.
> 
>     So far in the 2 full months I've had the service I've had no outages
>     and I'm pushing TBs up and down through it. The only port blocking
>     I've encountered is their old grandfather's firewalling of 25/tcp
>     outbound but nothing stopping ports inbound so far that I've found.
>     I have the same /29 subnet worth of static IP addresses at $10 less
>     per month than Comcast and AT&T doesn't charge a monthly fee for the
>     router and the installation fee was waived for me. I'm currently
>     paying half what I paid for Comcast and have over 20x the
>     bandwidth.  I was paying $150 to Comcast for the Business internet
>     and they were raising that so I went with AT&T for $75 a month.
> 
>     On 3/4/2019 7:24 PM, Jeff Hubbs via Ale wrote:
>>
>>     After many years at the status quo (AT&T UVerse and POTS land
>>     line) I'm finally looking into a rework of the home telecomm
>>     situation.
>>
>>     I have two main drivers that are forcing the decision:
>>
>>      1. Even after the shortest of power outages, upstream UVerse
>>         service goes dead and stays dead for 10-20 minutes. This was
>>         not always the case but in the last few years it's been the
>>         "new normal;" my wife works at home via VPN enough that that's
>>         a problem, and it's no good for me either. Yes, I have UPSses
>>         out the wazoo on everything and it doesn't matter. I've tried
>>         to get through to AT&T by phone to at least get the problem
>>         acknowledged but that's been impossible.
>>      2. There's a good chance I might be leaving town for my next job
>>         for an unknown amount of time, but that won't mean that I'll
>>         stop being the "IT guy" for the house; I will simply *have* to
>>         be able to shell in from the outside. If there is such a thing
>>         as a "reflector" service that sits on the Internet - even if
>>         it's my own server somewhere - that gives me a way to tunnel
>>         in reverse through some kind of connection that's initiated
>>         from inside the house, I don't want to be dependent on it.
>>
>>     Being able to run my own Internet-reachable web and email servers
>>     in the house is anticipated but is secondary to those two main
>>     drivers. 
>>
>>     It is my understanding that only AT&T and Comcast serve my street.
>>
>>     I've spoken to a rep for Comcast Business and they're telling me
>>     that within reason (with respect to affected region(s) and length
>>     of outage, I presume) their service will remain unaffected by
>>     power outage. That handles 1. above, and they also offer as few as
>>     one static IP address which should be sufficient to handle 2.
>>
>>     I have not yet called about any of AT&T's business residential
>>     offerings but when I got a flyer in the mail about some kind of
>>     fiber service being available in my neighborhood and called to
>>     inquire, I couldn't get anything even remotely like a straight
>>     answer but the upshot was that no, the fiber service wasn't
>>     available to me. I'm quite rather done with AT&T, to be honest.
>>
>>     Comcast says they can give me a VoIP-like service that can
>>     optionally use my old phone number. I'm undecided on that; the
>>     phone rings with random robocalls and other solicitations 3-5
>>     times a day (Do Not Call list notwithstanding) and there are only
>>     3 living persons whom we know who ever, *ever* call that line.
>>
>>     We would like to have a TV service with DVR available and it's my
>>     understanding from talking to Comcast that it would have to be
>>     Xfinity piggybacked on the Comcast Business service. It would be
>>     either that or satellite to still have DVR. I've never dealt with
>>     satellite service before but the houses to either side of us have
>>     it. I've built an HDTV antenna and mounted it in the attic but I
>>     haven't completed the cabling to know for sure how well it will
>>     work, and if we went that route, there'd be no DVR unless I went
>>     the whole MythTV (or equivalent) route and I'm really not willing
>>     to try that again.
>>
>>     I'm all (rabbit) ears, so let your replies rip.
>>