ISP Migration Complete

May 12 our ADSL line was moved from KPN to XS4ALL. Down time due to the migration was limited for about one and a half hour. The new modem went online without problems, minus the VOIP phone account. Due to some fluke in the systems of the providers (don't know which), you can onyl migrate a phone number if you have a working DSL account. I requested the move of the phone number immediately after the DSL came online. The planned date to move the phone line over was May 21. Yesterday, the phone line was indeed migrated, so we are fully connected again now.

Because XS4ALL allows you to have a mailserver connected directly to the internet (and not via a gateway), I was now able to implement "Sender Policy Framework" (SPF; http://www.openspf.org), for in and outgoing mail. It works great, a part of the SPAM is now blocked even before it enters the spam scanner.  The new provider even allows you to configure a reverse lookup addres for your own domain!

The day after we were migrated The Netherlands was hit by "the big ADSL  malfunction of 2008". Hundreds of thousands of homes went offline. The reason, a software problem in the ATM equipment of KPN (Alcatel Lucent stuff I think). This mafunction has proven to be very hard to resolve. We were not hit very hard at that day; the ADSL went offline 5 or six times for about a few minutes each. In the days after, KPN and XS4ALL worked very hard to resolve the problem (still not fixed completely yet), resulting in several interruptoins of the ADSL line per day. Yesterday was the first day without interruprions, but I got three today already. I really hope this is fixed soon. So if you had problems with this site, you now know the cause.

 As a sideline, RedHat Linux 5.2 came out yesterday (this server is running RedHat). I decided to be brave and upgrade directly. I'm happy to report the the upgrade went over without a hitch (downtime of only a few minutes; half an hour for webmail users)!