[NCLUG] ISP suggestions

[Frank Whiteley]

----- Original Message -----
From: "John L. Bass" <jbass at dmsd.com>
To: <nclug at nclug.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 03, 2002 11:41 PM
Subject: Re: [NCLUG] ISP suggestions


>
> Most people stick by local providers like FRII, simply to avoid AOL,
Quest, AT&T
> and large corporate america ... and frequently accept a little less in
services
> for supporting the local little guys. Not all customers are willing to
make this
> service quality tradeoff - and shop strictly by the dollar.
>
Most?  Most people seem to be using AOL, MSN, and Earthlink.  Last time I
checked, MSN and AOL were more expensive after the samples ran out and other
than content spam, didn't offer much.

FRII is a FULL access provider.  Shell, anonymous FTP, web space, e-mail,
DNS mirroring, user configurable SPAM filtering for $20/month and then
everything else for a little or a lot extra, depending on your needs.  If
not having FP extensions is less, that's about it.  What am I missing?
FWIW, last time I checked calling AOL support might be likely to get a cube
at Startek in Greeley.  I really liked it when Netcom customer support was
here at Sykes and they didn't even have a local dial-pop.  Those providing
support didn't even know how the service looked to the customers.  Low bid
call centers are a bit lacking IMVHO.  FRII is still growing their 24/7
support.

Here's a real good one.  If you've moved a domain off Qwest to another host
in the past 3-4 months, be sure to dig that domain at ns1.uswest.net and
ns2.uswest.net.  Those DNS servers are not getting updated and are still
showing erroneous A records months later.  Try getting Qwest support to fix
that one.  Half of Qwest is still running on the uswest.net domain including
a bunch of convoluted aliases that few seem able to fix.  Guess what bad MX
records and relic aliases do to e-mail.  The Qwest DNS servers will show the
right records, so expect their first response to be, "Our stuff is right,
it's not our problem".

BTW, can you connect to AOL and MSN on Linux??

Sorry for getting so far off topic here.

Frank