Dreamhost bouncing LL mail?

Yup.

Mark.. any dedicated hosting companies you can recommend at your colo?

blaze -- a while back, I inquired about getting a dedicated server in the colo that is in the same building as LL's servers (LL has their own floor I believe). I forget the name of the company now, however, they were not willing to deal with anything less than 36 machines. So sadly that is out of the question.

However, having jumped around a bit, 1and1.com dedicated servers are suprisingly good. SecondServer has two of them (one of them is the production box, the other is a box used for side projects, which I'm willing to give space on if you can give me a good reason.), SLUniverse is also hosted at 1and1, Kex Godel also uses 1and1 (I have heard of a few others too.).

Selection is pretty good, lots of distro images to choose from. Support sucks ass ([Clueless] Indian Call Center), especially billing. (Took us nearly 2 weeks to get a simple billing issue sorted.), however, the price cannot be beat, uptime and network avalibility has been mostly flawless. (I've recorded 3-4, 5 minute network downtimes in the last year, so YMMV)

Bandwidth is very good, ftp.us.debian.org averages 9mB/sec, with more transfer than you will ever use, the connection is a multi-homed 18,000mbit link, so it's not affected by Tier1 spats. Ping-time is alright, not fantastic, but reasonably good. The Web Admin control panel is superior compared to other hosting providers I've experienced. You can also automatically re-image, reboot, access serial console all from the web interface, additionally, a Cisco hardware firewall is availible as part of the package which can also be edited via the web interface.

If your willing to dish out the money for a dedicated server with them, the product is generally above that of other providers.

-Adam

I actually have a dedicated server with both serverbeach and ev1servers. I prefer serverbeach

I liked ev1servers before, they are all around awesome, except for the fact they are on cogent. Which is racing for the bottom and making a lot of enemies. Unfortunately, the ev1 business model seems to also be racing for the bottom which compounds the problem.

However, ev1 is a great company. Too bad they're pricing themselves too low.

1and1 has a great reputation as well, though.


Anyways, something a couple of hops away from the lindenlab network might prove to be interesting.

Some enterprising fellow here could set up and sell accounts with all the php / XML-RPC / email / mysql scripts prebaked and ready to go.

I don't think that Level3 is the problem.

Using:

http://level3.com/lookingglass/

and comming from LA, I'm able to ping Linden Labs address space.

Maybe whoever is working with Dreamhost can show this to them as proof that the block is /not/ upstream from them.

I should read more carefully in the future!

From Cisco's wesite. For those of you that do not know they are pretty much THE provider of the routers that are the backbone of the internet and most likly the ones we are pinging/trace routing.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/63/ping_traceroute.html
Towards the very bottom of the page. This is thier reference material for thier certifications I think.

The table below lists the characters that can appear in the traceroute command output.

IP Traceroute Text Characters

Character

Description

nn msec

For each node, the round-trip time in milliseconds for the specified number of probes

*

The probe timed out

A

Administratively prohibited (example, access-list)

Q

Source quench (destination too busy)

I

User interrupted test

U

Port unreachable

H

Host unreachable

N

Network unreachable

P

Protocol Unreachable

T

Timeout

?

Unknown packet type



the !A is the attempt at warning us that there is a "A" type status which is "Administratively prohibited".

An "Admin block" blocks only oe side of traffic and that is either going into the router from the "east" or the "west" and Linden is on the blocked side.

The reason why we don't see the block is because the block is directly against LL. If it was against you as a person or your ISP you would see it as well. Dreamhost and EVEN LEVEL 3 CANNOT SEE THE ADMINISTRATIVE SHUTDOWN! Whoever has acccess to that router though CAN if they look at the config.

Huns,

Test using their ping utility instead. You will see that you can reach Linden Labs via anywhere on the Level3 network. As many people have pointed out, traceroutes can sometimes lead you down the wrong path.

The Level3 traceoute appears to be using UDP, not ICMP. We block un-expected UDP traffic, so traceroute appears to stop right after our host. Since we do not block ICMP, ping will work, as would ICMP traceroute.

Just to make this a little more confusing, it appears that tracert.exe (the windows one) uses ICMP by default, while traceroute (the Unix one) uses UDP by default. I'm sure this isn't helping people understand the situation.

BTW: no contact from Dreamhost yet. Internap is, at this point, also trying to help us get in contact with them.

M

Okay, I think I managed to get through their normal technical support. The last message I recieved this morning was:



Hopefully I am getting somewhere here. Did anyone else hear anything from them lately?

Pete, it's an administrative block. That means that while Level 3 may well be able to communicate whatever they want between them and both parties, a filter exists that specifically blocks traffic going through their network if it's coming specifically from Dreamhost AND going specifically to LL, or vice versa.

Seems their Admin Team has a different definition of "shortly" than most. Still heard nothing from them. Anyone get anything on any front?

I signed up with another webhost a couple of days ago, and just closed my Dreamhost account. Let's hope things work out better here. Good luck to everyone who's waiting for resolution on this. I got tired of waiting.

Nothing here. Sorry. Our ISP (Internap) has tried to contact them again yesterday, but has recieved no response.

I just got this:



And I seem to be able to ping and do traceroute -I so I think we are finally alive. I'm now heading into world just to verify!

I can ping and traceroute -I to harpo.dreamhost.com from lindenlab.com now. Sweet.

Glad this issue has finally been resolved.

LOL!!! It had to happen the day I switched hosts. It just had to.

Oh well.

Thank you for your assistance, Mark. This experience has strengthened my trust in LL.

Okay.. no parties yet. I can send an rpc into SL, however emails from SL to Dreamhost does not appear to work.....

[Update] - Indeed, it is still blocking email it appears from SL. I can send from dreamhost to SL but not visa versa. I set up a mail forwarder and everything worked. I'll respond to Jeremy@dreamhost and see if we can get this last leg working...

Oy...

Glad to see some action on this, finally...

Ahhh, netengs, never a mea culpa. "Must have been a fluke!"

How annoying. It would be nice to know how this came about so it could be avoided in the future.

i have plenty of invites to gmail

just PM with your email addy and ill send one if you need it

i don't think google is going anywhere anytime soon

I have about 100 as well. Just send me an email with "invite" as the subject and I'll send them ASAP. If not before end of work definatly when I get home tonight. My email address is krazzora @gmail.com (no space but I am paranoid.)

... can anyone let me see what their .procmailrc file looks like on dreamhost?

Mine is:


You would want to change the "/home/foobar/local/bin/perl-static" to whatever language processor you want to run (I use a customized Perl interpretor I compiled on Dreamhost).

Mind you, last I tested, Dreamhost will still not recieve an email from SL. I am working with their tech support to hopefully figure out this last problem. (For the time being, setting up a mail forwarding account somewhere to forward to Dreamhost works).

I have confirmed that email works between LL and harpo in both directions, and inbound XML-RPC is functional as well.