[…] and clients, and tried just about every single third party client out there. In fact, Twitter even made my ISP suck less that one time. I love the service and I enjoy using […]

take a printout of your Mr Rooter and Mr 126 times along with you to management. Point out that this one event cost 3 hours of your wages… and then point out that replacing the modem 3 times the previous year cost more of your wages, downtime, any other charges you can think of, all on bad ‘residential’ advice. Point out also that the time you spend working around the blocks put on a residential service effectively costs the company as well, time that could be better spent chatting to the receptionist working diligently for increased profit margins.

Yeah, but that’s what happens in small companies – the “why do we need the expensive business plan if we could buy two residential ones for the same price” factor comes into play. :P

[quote comment=”8937″][quote post=”2423″]er… I assume your company uses a professional connection.[/quote]

Actually, we seem to be on a residential circuit – go figure. I’m assuming it got set up like that, because it dirt cheep at the time. :(

Oh well, I guess this is a good argument to present to the big boss in explaining to him why the extra expense is actually worth it.[/quote]

Just had one of those jaw-drop moments. Running a business on a residential connection is insane. Business contracts come with better SLAs, better response times, and easier access to assistance. Depending on your SLA, you may even have a right to compensation if your business suffers because of a loss of connection due to avoidable actions at the ISP end. If a morning without email sends your company into a panic, then you shouldn’t be on a residential connection.

That being said, I’ve heard an argument for SMBs having two residential connections with different ISPs over different paths, as some outages affect both business and residential users identically and sometimes the business connections are insanely priced. Basically you use one residential line to cover for outages in the other.

[quote post=”2423″]er… I assume your company uses a professional connection.[/quote]

Actually, we seem to be on a residential circuit – go figure. I’m assuming it got set up like that, because it dirt cheep at the time. :(

Oh well, I guess this is a good argument to present to the big boss in explaining to him why the extra expense is actually worth it.

[quote post=”2423″]Also, a protip you probably already know: my favorite tool for diagnosing smtp-troubles is ‘telnet’.[/quote]

Yep, that’s what I was doing. Actually, I have a sheet with the list of relevant POP and SMTP commands hanging in my cube just for the times like this. :)

I agree that it makes no sense for an ISP to without prior notice suddenly block ports on a company connection.

However, I don’t think blocking outgoing port 25 is a short-term knee jerk thing. It really makes it impossible for spammers to use hacked local computers as spam relays. If outgoing port 25 traffic is blocked there really is no way to directly contact most of the email servers on the Internet, since they all listen on port 25. The spammer would have to set the hacked computer to go through another relay on another port — and if so, the first relay is useless as it does not expand the bandwidth.

Also, a protip you probably already know: my favorite tool for diagnosing smtp-troubles is ‘telnet’. Simply doing
telnet smtp.offsite.example.com 25
and run the smtp conversation manually to inject an email have helped me find the source of several problems in the past.

Furthermore, if it is a professional connection, why did they not warn you in advance of changes that may affect business? Shutting off an industry standard port surely falls under that category.

er… I assume your company uses a professional connection. Why on earth are they blocking ports on a professional connection? The implication of a professional connection being that there’s a sysadmin of some stripe administering it?

I think its very innovative though, to use twitter.

If I was running a company I would use all means like that, myspace the works… that way everyone can stay connected.

I’m sure that is not his only responsibility. But yeah, being the Twitter spokesperson for a company wouldn’t be a bad job. :P