Re: [Sheflug] blueyonder blues

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo! The Great Prophet Matt Fairtlough uttered these words of wisdom:
> 
> no, not your general support person and not for arbitrary enquiries. 
> But supporting hardware firewall users could be done better I believe,
> there could be more online information. A linux firewall should be more
> secure than a windows one, especially just a software solution. 
> Actually they also say they don't support home networks at all.

That's right. You can have a home network, but don't expect them to offer
any tech  support for it - again, far too much variation for it to be
viable. Your contract with BY covers the network as far as the cable modem, 
anything beyond that is your responsibility :-)

As for hardware firewalls, again - there's a lot of products on the market. 
BY don't support firewalls at all. One of the first things tech support 
will ask you do is disable it to ensure that it isn't the firewall that's 
stopping things working (whether this is a good thing or not is a subject 
for another day).

You may want to poke your head into blueyonder.comp.linux and similar 
newsgroups hiding on news-text.blueyonder.co.uk -- it's all self-help 
(i.e., users helping users), and most of the tech support in the
blueyonder.support.* hierachy are a little more clued up than what you may 
get on the front line phone calls.

>  
> > As for DNS, I avoid the problem by running BIND locally... :-)
> 
> hmm, I thought about that but I don't think I'm in your league.
> 

A no-frills caching-only DNS server should be straightforward to set up. It 
only gets tricky if you want to do more with it (actually it's all straight 
forward, but it's just more to learn).

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson                 \ NP: Texas - 04. Sunday Afternoon
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk          \  
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  \ 
   \ http://redclaw.org.uk/        ~---------------------------------------



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