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Dyndns is a great solution to the dynamic IP problem; however most ISPs have provisions in their TOS that specifically forbid the use of email -or other- servers.

What is your ISP again?

I've publicly posted my dynamic IP here. See if you can take it down, asshat!

$ whois sorbaralaw.com

...

Domain Name: SORBARALAW.COM

Administrative Contact:
Flynn and Sorbara jforce@sympatico.ca
300 Victoria Street North
Kitchener Ontario, Ontario N2H 6R9
CA
999 999 9999 fax: 999 999 9999

Technical Contact:
Knight, Peter peter@PKSERVICES.COM
60 Poinsetta Drive
Thornhill, Ontario L3T2T6
CA
XXX-XXXX fax: 999 999 9999

Some really cool inventions you may find handy:

1. DynDNS (Give your dial up/DSL computer a DNS address!)
2. SCP (Copy files securely to and from any computer!)

In case you're wondering, these significantly streamline the Internet option.

I did this same thing, but be warned, I would not trust this scenario if your company does not have it's own data center or you don't plan on hosting it in a data center (ie, don't setup the email server under your desk). One 24 hour span without power or internet and you won't get the chance for "anymore of your bright ideas".

I currently host my mail in a datacenter (along with our webserver, etc). I was actually looking at moving it in-house. I do have a "server room" here that is locked, has everything on UPS (~1 hour capacity for the main server). I have a pretty decent internet connection (10mbps/1mbps cable) and although I've only had one outage in the 8 months I've been using it (knock on wood..), I don't trust it to host anything on it.

My datacenter is very nice, but the reason I want to move it is because everyone here uses IMAP, and we have a huge chunk of space on the server taken up by mail (4gb or so). The benefits to moving it in-house would be that it would be easier to backup (just part of the existing server backup scheme), faster to access, work even if the connection is down, and actually use our LDAP server for authentication.

What I was looking at doing was using Mailhop Relay, which act as your MX servers, and run spam/virus filtering (if you want), then deliver mail to your MX server (static or dynamic IP) on whatever port you want (in case your ISP blocks port 25). It seems like it would be a decent solution, but I don't know of anyone actually using it. I've been meaning to setup a fake domain on it first, just to test it for a while, but never got around to it.

Is anyone out there using (or has anyone used) mailhop relay? How's the service/uptime/etc?

There are lots of reputable companies that do email hosting for small businesses that don't charge much, and handle all the backup, power, liability etc for you

Backup, power, sure. Liability? I don't think so.. you may get an SLA that gives you money back if services are down, but if you miss that $30,000 contract because your email server was down, you can be damn sure that the ISP is not going to reimburse you.

If all you're looking for is a way to keep tabs on a machine's IP#, there's a very simple way of doing it that comes w/ some other benefits as well:
use a dynamic DNS service.
Like http://www.cjb.net/ and http://www.dyndns.com/

You go to their site, create a DNS entry for your machine with your current IP#.

Then you make a small script to connect to those sites and update that IP# and set that script to run at startup.

The result is if your machine is on DHCP or moves around a lot (or gets stolen), you'll know its current IP# (or at least it's most recent IP#).

--Clayto

I note that ipcop is only on version 0.1.1 and I wonder if this means that the product is still evolving.

How would a product like Mandrake Server compare, apart from potentially being much bigger? (e-smith was only about 400 MB for the complete package).

I would love to see a distributed name to IP resolution service, that uses an architecture similar to Gnutella . Of course there is no reason to limit the service to domain name resolution. It can be quite handy to resolve an email address to an IP address, too.

This new piece of Internet infrastructure would be very handy for anyone wanting to do things cheaply. I'm thinking of:

• Web servers
• Remote access (VNC)
• chat
• voice over IP
• multi-player gaming

> Does anyone know of a way to get a free IP so you can run your own server from home?

<UI>
http://www.dyndns.com
http://www.dyndns.org
</UI>

anyone know about music for Lord of the Rings?

Any chance of them taking music from Johan DeMeij (spel?)? He wrote a wonderful symphony with themes from Tolken's novels.

~JON email jon@ilb.dyndns.com

DynDNS was terrific, that's what it was. I'm dialing in on a school account, and it used to be that I could have my Linux box set up as terrania.dyn.ml.org so that I could telnet into it from the computer lab or wherever and check my mail, or run webpages or chatservers on it. But then it went away, sigh...now I have a script kludge that emails the current IP address to another account that I can check and use to telnete in, but it's just not the same.

Of course, ML's DYNDNS service was never the most reliable thing in the world to begin with...if DHS can do better, I'll be very, very happy about things.

A couple of notes...Linux Gazette had an article about using DynDNS services, complete with scripts, in one of their back issues--I think it was the January one. There is a commercial DynDNS service, DynDNS.Com, that charges $25 a year for DynDNS service, too.

Also, for the DHS folks...did you know that there is a Dynamic IP hosting system for Linux out there? It's called GnuDIP--check Freshmeat for it. I haven't looked at it myself, but maybe it'll have some stuff you can use in it.

Good luck, and I have to say I can't wait 'til I can have terrania.(dyn.)dhs.org! :)