Unwanted ISP change - major annoyance

[Juancho]

So, at home I'm a Luddite and I've been a happy surfer on a POTS copper
phone line with classic ADSL bolted on it, since 2002.

This ADSL service started as 512 kbps downstream and 128 kbps upstream
back then (old ADSL), and now it is working at 8 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up
(ADSL 2+). More than enough for my needs, which are basically browsing
Slashdot, SoylentNews, Hacker News Y-combinator, and some web forums.

I've never changed ISP (I'm with the incumbent one in my area). I've
never migrated away from POTS+ADSL. I don't have a mobile phone with any
data plan attached to my classic ADSL subscription. I don't like
changing what works, and my workplace provides me with a mobile phone
with a basically unlimited data plan. Plus I've been enjoying at home a
free fixed (at least, no matter what its reverse DNS says, it never
changes) public IP address, which I use to SSH into my home server when
in need of that (among other things).

And I wanted to keep it all just like that.

But... But I've just gotten a certified paper-based communication from
my ISP: they are going to decommission all the copper circuits at the
station which provides service to my home, and they are telling me to
migrate to optical fiber or else say bye bye to my POTS line number and
attached ADSL service.

So I am forced, --FORCED--, to do what I've been actively avoiding doing
for more than a decade: changing in any shape or form my perfectly
working home Internet connection.

I am only worried about one thing: will I be able to keep hosting my own
email and DNS on my home server, as I do now, with a more-or-less stable
public IP address? Will I be unwillingly submitted to "carried grade"
NAT? Fuck if I know. Fuck if I want to devote time to "fix" what has
been working so well for me so far.

So I'm fucked. Thought you may want to know.

Regards,

[Julian Macassey]

Post by Juancho
So I am forced, --FORCED--, to do what I've been actively avoiding doing
for more than a decade: changing in any shape or form my perfectly
working home Internet connection.
I am only worried about one thing: will I be able to keep hosting my own
email and DNS on my home server, as I do now, with a more-or-less stable
public IP address? Will I be unwillingly submitted to "carried grade"
NAT? Fuck if I know. Fuck if I want to devote time to "fix" what has
been working so well for me so far.
So I'm fucked. Thought you may want to know.

Static IPs to most ISPs are considered unneccessary.
This I believe is particularly so on fiber.

You could put up a "virtual" server someowhere.

[Wojciech Derechowski]

[...]

Post by Julian Macassey

Post by Juancho
So I'm fucked. Thought you may want to know.

You could put up a "virtual" server someowhere.

Or depending on the network type you can probably talk to the ISP about
the profile they are going to push, or at the very least about the fee
for a fixed IP.

WD
--
Who is Entscheidungs and what is his problem?

[Juancho]

Post by Wojciech Derechowski
[...]

Post by Julian Macassey

Post by Juancho
So I'm fucked. Thought you may want to know.

You could put up a "virtual" server someowhere.

Or depending on the network type you can probably talk to the ISP about
the profile they are going to push, or at the very least about the fee
for a fixed IP.

Already talked to them. Not possible to get a fixed IP for "residential"
fiber. So there's that.

I'm getting to grips with the idea of dealing with the fallout of
whatever comes from this unwanted change. I can "perfectly" go for a
couple of weeks without my personal email working. ("Perfectly" defined
as "I am decided not to rise my blood pressure because of all this".)

Yeah, I could rent a VPS for dirt cheap in the cloud. But I was on the
thought train of keeping my home Debian Sarge install (on a Pentium-II
silent laptop) running until the end of the UNIX epoch (if I live long
enough for that). I'm still on that train of thought. To each his own.

[David Gersic]

Post by Juancho
So I'm fucked. Thought you may want to know.

Yep.

I also hate change at home, since that's just like having to do more of what
I do at work.

[Scott]

Post by Juancho
I am only worried about one thing: will I be able to keep hosting my own
email and DNS on my home server, as I do now, with a more-or-less stable
public IP address? Will I be unwillingly submitted to "carried grade"
NAT? Fuck if I know. Fuck if I want to devote time to "fix" what has
been working so well for me so far.
So I'm fucked. Thought you may want to know.

If it's any comfort, you do not suffer alone. My ILEC made a sub rosa
decision to not support DSL anymore, but instead of just killing it,
they gradually made it so bad that everybody else wanted to kill it.
So when my ISP decided they would drop DSL, it meant that I would drop
DSL. I admit it made me unreasonably happy to tell the LEC to get
stuffed, but it left me with a problem.

Without getting into useful details, suffice to say that the lack of
static IP has proven to not be a problem. There are (free!) DDNS
services out there that give you all you need to find your way home.
The NAT issue...I got nothin'. My new carrier didn't impose that on
me. Maybe one can buy a public IP in that case?

Like you, I hate touching something that ain't broke. But the only
true constant is being pissed off at people who just can't leave well
enough alone.

[Garrett Wollman]

Post by Scott
Without getting into useful details, suffice to say that the lack of
static IP has proven to not be a problem. There are (free!) DDNS
services out there that give you all you need to find your way home.
The NAT issue...I got nothin'. My new carrier didn't impose that on
me. Maybe one can buy a public IP in that case?
Like you, I hate touching something that ain't broke. But the only
true constant is being pissed off at people who just can't leave well
enough alone.

I have chosen for many years to buy "business" Internet service at
home. This costs significantly more than a "triple play" bundle would
from one of the other carriers, but given me a predictable,
contractual price for the connectivity I actually need.

-GAWollman

[The Horny Goat]

Post by Scott
Like you, I hate touching something that ain't broke. But the only
true constant is being pissed off at people who just can't leave well
enough alone.

<clap> <clap> <clap>
Too true. I understand that technology changes but definitely not
always for the better.

I recently pulled cable through my house to accomodate my wife and
daughter who were unhappy with the wireless connect speed tthey were
getting. They didnt see why I should get 300 mbps while they got
30.... like you say I hated doing that and procrastinated endlessly
until their pressure was unbearable mostly because I hate doing at
home what i do at work.

My son does tech support at the local science center and they've got a
great way of layiing cable - they use drop ceilings and have a radio
controlled toy car. Two guys get up on ladders with their heads above
the ceiling. The guy at the server controls the joystick controller
which drives the car with has network cable duct taped to it. A second
guy feeds cable through the ceiling while a third fellow at the
destination waves a flag to show the controller where to go. When the
car falls through the hole they pull the cable through till it's
suitably taut.

My son says it's the most popular job on the support team!

[Juancho]

If it's any comfort, you do not suffer alone. (...)
Without getting into useful details, suffice to say that the lack of
static IP has proven to not be a problem. There are (free!) DDNS
services out there that give you all you need to find your way home.
The NAT issue...I got nothin'. My new carrier didn't impose that on
me. Maybe one can buy a public IP in that case?

Well, I'm all set on fiber now. I wasn't easy, as I had suspected.

The DynDNS solution you mention, Scott, does not work for me, as I host
my own DNS and therefore my public IP is to be declared in the glue
record for my personal domain at the DNS Registry.

But I had some hiccups in the journey from copper-based ADSL to optical
fiber... After leading the optical cable all the way up to the condo's
fifth floor where my apartment is, they guy doing the physical
installation had some trouble doing the fusing of the optical cable at
the termination point inside the house. He managed to make it work at
the third try, we checked the Internet was reachable and he left. Then,
that same evening, the Internet went down and the PON light went red in
the ONT box. Turns out the fusing was brittle, and it broke. So I had to
phone the installer guy and request a fix, but he is a busy person and
it took him two days to come back and redo the cable fusing.

Which he did. Then I dove into opening the ports I needed open in the
new home router, which proved not to be possible, as I had been assigned
a main IPv6 address and a CGNAT'ed IPv4. I could open ports in the IPv4
address, but through some fucking IPv6-related joke called PCP, which
basically goes like this: you tell it to open port 443/tcp, and it opens
some random port like 20367/tcp in the WAN side and then injects the
traffic into 443/tcp in the LAN side. Not a viable option as public DNS
is hardwired to port 53 and public-facing SMTP is written in stone to
need port 25.

So I contrived some innocent looking lie and headed to my new ISP
support web forums, where I said I have (I really don't) a
domo-controller for the heating and for the air conditioning of the
house, which needs to be reachable at some fixed port from the public
Internet, because that's the way its Chinese manufacturer has born it.
So they acknowledged the problem, and to my amazement promptly removed
my line from their IPv6 pool and landed me with an old trusty, naked
beautiful, pure IPv4 address; with which the router allowed me to open
all the ports I needed to my heart's content.

Then I went to the Registrar through which I bought my personal domain
(which is "Tnaqv.arg", by the way), and sure enough the operation to
change the glue records through their web-based control panel gave a
nasty error when tried. I had to open a support case with them. They
changed themselves the glue record as I told them I needed done; but
they didn't reply to me neither by email (I have an emergency
"Tznvy.pbz" account for these occasions) nor by their support web page.
Which is not all that nice of them.

(So I am now looking to transfer the domain registration with another
Registrar who does not suck. In the past when "Tnaqv.arg" was
French-owned by a team of geeks, it worked well; then it was bought by
some USA-based megacorp, and it has gone downhill ever since in the
customer care department. Any suggestions for a nice, competent,
non-intrusive DNS Registrar whose dealing causes the least friction?)

So, after all that is done, I am now surfing on a symmetric 100 Mbps
fiber-based Internet link (which is the cheapest and slowest I could
buy), and I am no longer paying the Internet service to the incumbent
ISP in my area but to its competitor. (I swear I would have preferred to
remain just as I was before, but I was given no choice as I was fired as
a customer of their copper-based ADSL service.)

[The Horny Goat]

Post by Juancho
I am only worried about one thing: will I be able to keep hosting my own
email and DNS on my home server, as I do now, with a more-or-less stable
public IP address? Will I be unwillingly submitted to "carried grade"
NAT? Fuck if I know. Fuck if I want to devote time to "fix" what has
been working so well for me so far.
So I'm fucked. Thought you may want to know.

You certainly are - though in this area we would call this "being in
an extreme state of bliss" (Or perhaps that was the definition for
'f***ed up" - can't recall)

[Robert Heinlein said in one of his books (not sure which but it was
one of the Lazarus Long books) that telling someone to "f*** off!" was
something you wanted to say to a FRIEND not an enemy since 'if you're
going to wish someone great sex isn't that something you'd rather do
for a friend than an enemy?"]

Good luck to you - you really do need to talk to one of their support
people and they're hard to get through to jutst like the comercial
post office billing department which I've been listening to their
muzak for 15-20 minute while reading newgroups and writing this
instead of actual $ORK. Talk to the right person and you probably get
the answers you need to decide in 2-3 minutes, wrong person - 2 or 3
hours IF you're lucky.

[Michele]

Post by Juancho
But... But I've just gotten a certified paper-based communication from
my ISP: they are going to decommission all the copper circuits at the
station which provides service to my home, and they are telling me to
migrate to optical fiber or else say bye bye to my POTS line number
and attached ADSL service.

My condo was selected in 1999 to have an experimental ftth system. So
they put a router in the basement and used fiber-optic ethernet
connection to the routers inside the flats. They upgraded to 100 mbps
Ethernet and all was nice and good, and of course I had a fixed IP
address to the home router.

So I had a 100Mbps Ethernet at home, Then technology marched on and they
switched technology and used the GPON, that was advertised as Gigabit
fiber, unfortunately, their advertised gigabit speed was a wishful
thinking.
Luckily I still have my fixed IPv4 address and the new router they
leased me works nicely.



Mike