My brother does a variety of things, as I do including the front line of dealing with todays technology. This means looking to calls about DSL modem outages and problems. Well, he was passing along that in the last several days he’s come across several Bellsouth AT&T DSL customers with a problem with the control interface. He went into the modem configuration to configure pinhole routing after things were stabilized and… clicked the Expert Mode link. There was nothing there. We speculated that perhaps the modem had a bad firmware flash? We even wondered if AT&T had changed policy and stripped the Expert settings. It turns out that the solution is fairly simple.
Tag: bellsouth
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Where did Expert Mode go on my Westell DSL modem?
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Why? (Why couldn’t AT&T make sure their mail servers weren’t using old dialup IPs that are blacklisted….)
Why do I always wind up being the one to discover problems? …. Today in checking mail I found a mail that had bounced back from one of my clients that uses bellsouth… Now bellsouth has recently been bought by AT&T and it appeared as though the mail had been rejected because the mailserver trying to deliver it was in an email blacklist. *(What – a bellsouth mailserver in a blacklist?) Well, we’ve gone through this before with some of the passive blacklists where people might relay junk through their isp, but… on searching the AT&T outbound mailserver 207.115.11.54 was in the dial up block lists at sorbs and nomorefun…. (as was 207.115.11.55) These seem to be the new fmailhost04.isp.att.net and fmailhost05.isp.att.net outbound mail machines.
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Using DNS servers other than your ISP’s
As I mentioned earlier, Bellsouth seemed to be in the midst of a big DNS meltdown when I got up this morning. I spent some time getting various bellsouth customers “worked around” the issue by setting up an alternate DNS server for them. For starters…. DNS translates addresses like google.com into numbers (like 72.14.207.99) Think of it as a telephone directory lookup service… you can’t pickup a phone and punch in the letters of someones name to call them, you have to dial a number and first you have to see what the number is…. in networking, the computer does the DNS lookup for you when you type google.com in your browser bar. (Or when the browser tries to load it’s home page for instance.)
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Major Bellsouth DNS issues
This morning, I’m noticing some of the machines I monitor having big DNS problems. It seems to be Bellsouth.net’s dns servers gone sideways – none seem to respond. On one network in particular we’re having trouble getting a secondary (outside network) dns server to respond. From outside the bellsouth network things seem fine though. As usual dslreports is a good place to check if others are having the same issue. It appears as though this issue is affecting ALL of bellsouth’s network and has been since at the latest 11:30PM last night (the 16th of October.)
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Bellsouth mail.lig.bellsouth.net server phasing out?
I haven’t had much time to look into this, but one of the mailservers I administer is typically configured to relay through mail.lig.bellsouth.net, with mail.averyjparker.com as a fallback. Sometime overnight, mail.averyjparker.com started getting heavy use and on checking this morning was getting all of the outbound traffic. So, I did a bit of investigation mail.lig.bellsouth.net is no longer found and I’ve switched the configuration to mail.bellsouth.net and all is churning along well.
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Modern Computer Viruses are almost NEVER from whom they claim to be from
This is one that I’ve probably talked about before, but it’s worth rehashing because of a call I had this afternoon. A customer had been receiving phone calls and email messages from folks asking that he stop sending them a virus. Essentially all of the viruses were claiming to be from his email address and he was very concerned that his system had been compromised.