*Opens mouth* *Closes mouth* Well hell. That's a damned good question. I hadn't even noticed that! I never really noticed a bug in Slashcode before (never had time to run it locally). I've got features I'd like to add though. That's weird as hell. I'm not even sure what discussion the batteries stuff came from. Weird! LOL. Nice catch.
LOL. If you can't tell if I was trolling or serious then I must not have done a good job writing my last message.:-) For the record I was serious. I haven't used ReiserFS but I have researched it a little bit. I also took note of the Kernel make menuconfig details on Reiser. That's where I first found the note about patching quota and NFS packages. It makes sense, assuming that they don't already support Reiser. I wonder if the more current versions of nfs-utils and quotatools automatically support it. I looked into Reiser a year or two ago when I built a 480GB array. I went with ext3 since it was so easy to get going. I also felt that Reiser wasn't fully supported by everything at the time. I haven't taken the time to look into it since. I'm sure it works well though. Like all things it probably has its quirks, but is easy to get going for someone that knows those quirks already. Maybe I'll add it to my collection of skills someday.
I wonder if WD is shipping the RAID-compotent firmware on all drives now... That might explain it. They were quite adament about it before. 3ware hardware support PDF even mentioned not using them.
I have a Coolermaster 201 sitting in front of me right now. It is are 4 WD1200JBs, a floppy, a DVD-ROM, and a CDRW (not to mention a dozen fans). PCI cards are pretty simple. 2 short nics (3com and dlink), AGP ATI video card, and a 3ware 7506-4LP (not a terribly big card). I had to situate the 3ware so that the slot below it was free or I wouldn't be able to get my round cables on the IDE headers. The ribbon cables I used before made the machine a nightmare to work on. They couldn't be routed around the box in a pretty fashion because I couldn't use the bottom PCI slot for the RAID controller. I agree ribbons can be fine if you engineer the case with them in mind (like Apple does). For the average Joe they are a pain to work with. SATA is a dream come true in that department. I wish I would just drop $600 on this machine to switch to SATA.
I haven't used RAID 1 in years so I couldn't say for sure. The other replier said his recent discussions with the tech dept didn't say anything about it so perhaps WD is shipping the fixed firmware on all drives now. It's possible I suppose. I rarely update the firmware on my drives. I definitely don't do it if there is data on them I'd like to keep.:-) Maybe next time I bring a new machine online I'll copy the data over there temporarily.
Reiser would probably be fine for most folks if they know how to get it going. Ext3 is really just ext2 with a journal so getting it up and running is easy as pie. No, wait, it's even easier than that.:-) Reiser would do fine for this guy I'm sure though. He'd have to patch NFS and quota tools to support it. I can't remember if there are others of the top of my head. I doubt his stock kernel would have support for it so he'd have to roll his own. I'm not sure if he's that type of guy or not. I've never benchmarked Reiser. How's it for speed?
BTW, I should have mentioned that these conversations weren't with sales droids (I don't know if your's were or not). The conversations were with upper-level techs. It seems they all pass you up the food chain when you call in and are very irate about losing data.:-) They said internal benchmarks singled out the WD's (without the firmware updates) as horrible performers. That response was consistent across the board. I wonder how the current offerings from WD fair. For the record I have 4 WB1200JB drives in the machine I'm typing on right now. 2 are individuals and two are striped together. The stripe fairs worse in terms of speed than one of the individual drives. This is on a 3Ware 7000-2. Neither drive has the newer firmware since the array was full before the firmware became available (and I finally heard about it). The speed improvement isn't worth the risk to my existing data however.
I've had lengthy discussions with all of them and all of the said to avoid WD drives. The only brand I use anymore is 3Ware (although LSI is also quite nice and I have a college buddy working their too). I wouldn't recommend anything else. I have a Highpoint 404 that I pulled out of disgust. I keep thinking I'd sell it on ebay. I should just throw the piece of trash out.
...buy a decent RAID controller. Don't buy a POS Highpoint or Promise card. I speak from experience with both when I say you will regret it. Buy a decent brand of card such as a 3Ware or LSI. Adaptec is also fine if you're using SCSI drives. I personally have 3 3Ware cards (7000-2, 7506-4LP, 8506-12) and love them all. I also have an Adaptec 2940U2W in my old Mac that I'm also quite fond of (not to mention a few 2940UW controllers floating around somewhere). Buying a good controller is probably the most important thing you can do. You need excellent driver support. Highpoint cards and their support of Linux is a joke at best. The driver is a freaking nightmare. I've had 2 experiences with Promise controllers and OEM chipsets. Neither were positive and both resulted is massive amounts of lost data. 3Ware and LSI support in Lilnux is excellent, as is Adaptec. #1 rule of building any array is start with a quality controller.
Next up is drives. Not all drives are alike as I'm sure you already know. Do you want a SCSI or an IDE array? I won't go into this lengthy topic further. I'll assume though that you will build an IDE array. Some drives do not work well in RAID setups. The controller companies are more likely to tell you this than the drive manufacturers. I own 6 Western Digital WD12000JB drives (7200 RPM, 8MB cache, 120GB capacity). By all accounts one would expect those drives to work quite well in a RAID setup. They have excellent read/write times individually and have a massive amount of cache. Well, one would think that and they'd be wrong. Both 3ware, Highpoint, and Asus tech support (on an OEM Promise chipset in teh A7V333) recommend against using Western Digital drives. 3Ware did however say that WD will give you firmware that works significantly better in RAID setups if you ask for it. Personally I'm a fan of Maxtor, both the drives and the company. I've had very few failures with Maxtor drives. Whenever I did they were always extremely helpful with getting me a replacement fast. I've been very impressed by ther service. I have 2 Maxtor 7Y250P0 and 2 6Y200P0 drives in the server sitting next to me. The second is a very high quality drive from Maxtor's DiamondMaX Plus 9 line. It too have 8MB cache and 200GB to spare and runs at 7200 RPM. Nice drive. The first pair are from Maxtor's MaXLine Plus II. They have a high MTTF, 8MB cache, 250GB space, and run at 7200 RPM. They are also a little bit faster than the 6Y200P0. They are excellent drives. My next drives will also be Maxtors but this time I'll be buying the SATA siblings of the MaxLine Pluss II product line.
That brings me to my next point. PATA or SATA. Does your case have an abundance of room? I mean a massive amount of room to route long 80-conductor ribbon cables? Do you have at least 1 if not 2 PCI slots to waste below your RAID controller with the room needed to route the ribbon cables and make connections? If not then you need to go with Serial ATA drives. Don't even think twice about it. Go with SATA. The drives cost almost the same nowadays and you'll find wht little price difference there is ($5?) is worth it in the end. SATA drives are so much easier to wire. I have a case full of round cables. The case I have is an extremely large Codegen case and even I am having trouble with the cable mess. SATA is a wonderful thing. Along the same lines is hot-swap cages. There are a dozen brands to choose from. You should probably utilize them, even if you don't need hot-swap capabilities. I need them to create 3.5 drive slots from 5.25 bays. If you do want to do hot-swapping, make sure you drive cage and controller support it.
Finally we get to RAID levels. You don't want to increase your risk of losing data so level 0 is out. 1 is extremely redundant and with the right controller can actually speed up reads. It's also costly at twice the cost per GB. Unless the data you're storing is absolutely critical you won't want to use 1 (in most cases). Forget about level 2. For starters th
Could someone tell me a bit about the MM patches? I've used Morton's patches for some time now but I never understood when the guts of his patches made it into an actual vanilla kernel release. Does anyone know? For example the last MM patch as of right now is for 2.6.7-rc3. Does that mean the vanilla 2.6.7 now contains all of MM before that? I never have quite understood that.
I don't know if you meant to reply to me or the parent, but you made my point better than I did.
LOL, it's hard to say. I have a tendancy to fat-click the reply to links.:-) I'm too lazy to go back and search for the chat section too. It sounds like we're saying the same thing though.
Bad analogy. I'm a compotent sysadmin. I can make any system secure enough to meet my needs. Yes, even Windows. I don't need O-BSD folks second-guessing my abilities as a sysadmin.
That's an absurd notion. Just because something is marketed as being able to do something illegal has absoultely no merits on what one actually does with the product. Lets say for example that Beretta advertised their 92FS as being able to 'cap gang bitches with ease' or Ford advertised their F150 as 'being able to transport 1000lbs of drugs'? Just because the product was advertised as being able to do something illegal doesn't mean that I, Joe Blow Consumer, will do something illegal with it. The notion that a person wanting an unlooper for legit purposes will buy one from a company that doesn't advertise the product as being able to do something illegal is absurd. What if that company charged twice as much for the "legit" unlooper than the company that advertised all the illegal things it could do? Would you expect someone to pay twice as much for the same thing? That notion is absurd.
That's like comparing a Datsun to a GMC. The Datsun is utterly barren and featureless (or was when it was introduced). Just because O-BSD has few security patches doesn't mean it's better. It has no features either.
The best thing I can think of wouldn't in fact be something eduactional--that would be distracting to me. Instead I find comfort in music. Pick up some jazz, big band, R&B, or something else not already in your collection and listen to that. It's a much better way to pass the time. Pop in a CD of the Rat Pack from one of their shows at the Sands and you'll be surprised how fast the time will fly.
Ok, we're not talking rocket science here. Basically what OpenBSD did today is add electronic fuel injection to their "secure" car. They still don't have an anti-lock brake system and are still using a straight pan-head but they do have the best damn seat belts and air bags in the business. Too bad their utter lack of attention to common performance enhancment technologies means you'll never go fast enough to NEED those super duper safety features.
The problem can be summed up in two words: Intolerance and Greed. Those two little words can sum up every problem ever encountered in humanity. Unfortunately this world is riddled with people infected with both.
Oh yeah. Well my father is bigger than your father. Ford sucks and GM rules. ATI out-renders Nvidia any day of the week. AMD kicks Intel's pipelines. Giga-Byte rules and Asus sucks. Buffy could whip Xena with one hand tied behind her back. (how am I doing?)
The fact that you need to update *insert-software-package-name-here* because of security related problems _at all_ is something I do not like.
I would describe a person such as yourself as a lazy, inefficient and piss-poor systems administrator that give us good administrators a bad name and make our jobs much more difficult. You're as bad as the Windows cronies that can't find the time in their oh so busy daily schedule to apply software patches and updates.
Your comparison is absurd. Hot coffee coming out of a camera? Try again. Think more along the lines of someone buying a container of hydrocloric acid for stone engraving. The consumer bought the acid from a company that was been repeatedly warned that the container they distributed the substance in was too weak to contain an acid of that strength. While putting the container in your truck the container literally falls apart in your hands. You get the living hell burnt out of your family jewels. You find out that this company had been repeatedly warned about the health risks from their reckless use of a flimsy container and a dangerous substance. You ask them to pay your medical bills caused by their reckless action. The baulk at you so you sue. You win. The jury is really pissed at the company so they award you many many times what you sued for. This gets reduced significantly later but your still win. Now all you have to concern yourself with are the absolute idiots on Slashdot like SatanicPuppy that think they know why your sued.
It's absolutely a living organism. It lives in the thoughts, words and actions of every individual representative in the UN. It lives in the interpretations of what the UN says and does in all the governments' actions represented in the UN. It's a much a living thing as you and I.
If Iraq and Saddam had actually been involved in a plot to perform terror attacks on the US and the UN was doing nothing then I could understand some unilateral action to defend the US. Since I don't believe that was the case and the Bush clan lied to us from day one about why we were there then I think the UN should be very pissed at us right now.
Since when is lowest-common-denominator the right way to go? Just because typical customers only use the internet for mail and WWW access, why don't you block all connections other than on port 80? After all, if people need to use something other than port 80, they aren't a typical customer, and shouldn't have the same type of service.
So you see no reason to block a port that has all but no legitimate use and is being used maliciously?
Why should access to port 25 cost any more than access to all other ports? I use much less bandwidth than the average person, I just happen to like fast and reliable e-mail service. There's no way to justify charging someone more money for port 25 being unblocked.
So you believe outbound SMTP shouldn't be blocked for anyone because you use it for legitimate purposes? That doesn't make any sense. If 99% of the people don't use it for legitimate purposes and 90% of the people are infected with viruses like SoBig and are being used to send spam (thus causing more of our netblocks to be blacklisted) then why should we allow anyone to use it? Not blocking it would be irresponsible.
Why don't you block port 25 by default, and unblock it for anyone who asks? That would almost completely solve the problem, while not screwing over your customers.
This would be an elegant solution if it were possible, which is isn't (at least in the case of any ISP issuing dynamic IPs). If we issued static IPs to our many thousand customers we could do something like this, although it would be an administrative nightmare. All our business customers (merchants, school districts, work-at-home folks wanting business speeds or needing a static IP get a static IP or netblock. Everyone else gets a dynamic IP just like all the other providers. Sure we could parse the radius logs for userids and the NAS port or assigned IP, figure out which AS they are connected to, and script the addition of an ACL to permit outbound SMTP on a per user basis. Then again I can all but gaurantee that it would never be used by any of our customers (sad, it would be nice though). Perhaps Cisco or some other company would come up with a slick way to do this. I'm sure it would be something proprietary and would require an end to end Cisco solution (like one of the wireless management products they demoed to me a few years ago).
You're quite lucky I'm not a customer of yours, or I would be raising hell like you couldn't imagine. Then I would switch to another ISP that doesn't place arbitrary restrictions on my connection, mainly designed to seperate me from more of my money.
You sound like one of the people we'd rather not have as a customer. If you were one of our customers and didn't like our service you'd be more than welcome to terminate your contract and switch to another provider. Oh wait, I forgot, we're the only show in town. Opps, not just this town but the 30 telephone exchanges we own. I suppose you could make a long distance call to AOL or Juno if you really don't like our service.
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*Opens mouth* *Closes mouth* Well hell. That's a damned good question. I hadn't even noticed that! I never really noticed a bug in Slashcode before (never had time to run it locally). I've got features I'd like to add though. That's weird as hell. I'm not even sure what discussion the batteries stuff came from. Weird! LOL. Nice catch.
LOL. If you can't tell if I was trolling or serious then I must not have done a good job writing my last message. :-) For the record I was serious. I haven't used ReiserFS but I have researched it a little bit. I also took note of the Kernel make menuconfig details on Reiser. That's where I first found the note about patching quota and NFS packages. It makes sense, assuming that they don't already support Reiser. I wonder if the more current versions of nfs-utils and quotatools automatically support it. I looked into Reiser a year or two ago when I built a 480GB array. I went with ext3 since it was so easy to get going. I also felt that Reiser wasn't fully supported by everything at the time. I haven't taken the time to look into it since. I'm sure it works well though. Like all things it probably has its quirks, but is easy to get going for someone that knows those quirks already. Maybe I'll add it to my collection of skills someday.
I wonder if WD is shipping the RAID-compotent firmware on all drives now... That might explain it. They were quite adament about it before. 3ware hardware support PDF even mentioned not using them.
I have a Coolermaster 201 sitting in front of me right now. It is are 4 WD1200JBs, a floppy, a DVD-ROM, and a CDRW (not to mention a dozen fans). PCI cards are pretty simple. 2 short nics (3com and dlink), AGP ATI video card, and a 3ware 7506-4LP (not a terribly big card). I had to situate the 3ware so that the slot below it was free or I wouldn't be able to get my round cables on the IDE headers. The ribbon cables I used before made the machine a nightmare to work on. They couldn't be routed around the box in a pretty fashion because I couldn't use the bottom PCI slot for the RAID controller. I agree ribbons can be fine if you engineer the case with them in mind (like Apple does). For the average Joe they are a pain to work with. SATA is a dream come true in that department. I wish I would just drop $600 on this machine to switch to SATA.
I haven't used RAID 1 in years so I couldn't say for sure. The other replier said his recent discussions with the tech dept didn't say anything about it so perhaps WD is shipping the fixed firmware on all drives now. It's possible I suppose. I rarely update the firmware on my drives. I definitely don't do it if there is data on them I'd like to keep. :-) Maybe next time I bring a new machine online I'll copy the data over there temporarily.
Reiser would probably be fine for most folks if they know how to get it going. Ext3 is really just ext2 with a journal so getting it up and running is easy as pie. No, wait, it's even easier than that. :-) Reiser would do fine for this guy I'm sure though. He'd have to patch NFS and quota tools to support it. I can't remember if there are others of the top of my head. I doubt his stock kernel would have support for it so he'd have to roll his own. I'm not sure if he's that type of guy or not. I've never benchmarked Reiser. How's it for speed?
BTW, I should have mentioned that these conversations weren't with sales droids (I don't know if your's were or not). The conversations were with upper-level techs. It seems they all pass you up the food chain when you call in and are very irate about losing data. :-) They said internal benchmarks singled out the WD's (without the firmware updates) as horrible performers. That response was consistent across the board. I wonder how the current offerings from WD fair. For the record I have 4 WB1200JB drives in the machine I'm typing on right now. 2 are individuals and two are striped together. The stripe fairs worse in terms of speed than one of the individual drives. This is on a 3Ware 7000-2. Neither drive has the newer firmware since the array was full before the firmware became available (and I finally heard about it). The speed improvement isn't worth the risk to my existing data however.
I've had lengthy discussions with all of them and all of the said to avoid WD drives. The only brand I use anymore is 3Ware (although LSI is also quite nice and I have a college buddy working their too). I wouldn't recommend anything else. I have a Highpoint 404 that I pulled out of disgust. I keep thinking I'd sell it on ebay. I should just throw the piece of trash out.
Next up is drives. Not all drives are alike as I'm sure you already know. Do you want a SCSI or an IDE array? I won't go into this lengthy topic further. I'll assume though that you will build an IDE array. Some drives do not work well in RAID setups. The controller companies are more likely to tell you this than the drive manufacturers. I own 6 Western Digital WD12000JB drives (7200 RPM, 8MB cache, 120GB capacity). By all accounts one would expect those drives to work quite well in a RAID setup. They have excellent read/write times individually and have a massive amount of cache. Well, one would think that and they'd be wrong. Both 3ware, Highpoint, and Asus tech support (on an OEM Promise chipset in teh A7V333) recommend against using Western Digital drives. 3Ware did however say that WD will give you firmware that works significantly better in RAID setups if you ask for it. Personally I'm a fan of Maxtor, both the drives and the company. I've had very few failures with Maxtor drives. Whenever I did they were always extremely helpful with getting me a replacement fast. I've been very impressed by ther service. I have 2 Maxtor 7Y250P0 and 2 6Y200P0 drives in the server sitting next to me. The second is a very high quality drive from Maxtor's DiamondMaX Plus 9 line. It too have 8MB cache and 200GB to spare and runs at 7200 RPM. Nice drive. The first pair are from Maxtor's MaXLine Plus II. They have a high MTTF, 8MB cache, 250GB space, and run at 7200 RPM. They are also a little bit faster than the 6Y200P0. They are excellent drives. My next drives will also be Maxtors but this time I'll be buying the SATA siblings of the MaxLine Pluss II product line.
That brings me to my next point. PATA or SATA. Does your case have an abundance of room? I mean a massive amount of room to route long 80-conductor ribbon cables? Do you have at least 1 if not 2 PCI slots to waste below your RAID controller with the room needed to route the ribbon cables and make connections? If not then you need to go with Serial ATA drives. Don't even think twice about it. Go with SATA. The drives cost almost the same nowadays and you'll find wht little price difference there is ($5?) is worth it in the end. SATA drives are so much easier to wire. I have a case full of round cables. The case I have is an extremely large Codegen case and even I am having trouble with the cable mess. SATA is a wonderful thing. Along the same lines is hot-swap cages. There are a dozen brands to choose from. You should probably utilize them, even if you don't need hot-swap capabilities. I need them to create 3.5 drive slots from 5.25 bays. If you do want to do hot-swapping, make sure you drive cage and controller support it.
Finally we get to RAID levels. You don't want to increase your risk of losing data so level 0 is out. 1 is extremely redundant and with the right controller can actually speed up reads. It's also costly at twice the cost per GB. Unless the data you're storing is absolutely critical you won't want to use 1 (in most cases). Forget about level 2. For starters th
Could someone tell me a bit about the MM patches? I've used Morton's patches for some time now but I never understood when the guts of his patches made it into an actual vanilla kernel release. Does anyone know? For example the last MM patch as of right now is for 2.6.7-rc3. Does that mean the vanilla 2.6.7 now contains all of MM before that? I never have quite understood that.
Impressive. Thanks!
LOL, it's hard to say. I have a tendancy to fat-click the reply to links. :-) I'm too lazy to go back and search for the chat section too. It sounds like we're saying the same thing though.
Bad analogy. I'm a compotent sysadmin. I can make any system secure enough to meet my needs. Yes, even Windows. I don't need O-BSD folks second-guessing my abilities as a sysadmin.
That's an absurd notion. Just because something is marketed as being able to do something illegal has absoultely no merits on what one actually does with the product. Lets say for example that Beretta advertised their 92FS as being able to 'cap gang bitches with ease' or Ford advertised their F150 as 'being able to transport 1000lbs of drugs'? Just because the product was advertised as being able to do something illegal doesn't mean that I, Joe Blow Consumer, will do something illegal with it. The notion that a person wanting an unlooper for legit purposes will buy one from a company that doesn't advertise the product as being able to do something illegal is absurd. What if that company charged twice as much for the "legit" unlooper than the company that advertised all the illegal things it could do? Would you expect someone to pay twice as much for the same thing? That notion is absurd.
That's like comparing a Datsun to a GMC. The Datsun is utterly barren and featureless (or was when it was introduced). Just because O-BSD has few security patches doesn't mean it's better. It has no features either.
The best thing I can think of wouldn't in fact be something eduactional--that would be distracting to me. Instead I find comfort in music. Pick up some jazz, big band, R&B, or something else not already in your collection and listen to that. It's a much better way to pass the time. Pop in a CD of the Rat Pack from one of their shows at the Sands and you'll be surprised how fast the time will fly.
Ok, we're not talking rocket science here. Basically what OpenBSD did today is add electronic fuel injection to their "secure" car. They still don't have an anti-lock brake system and are still using a straight pan-head but they do have the best damn seat belts and air bags in the business. Too bad their utter lack of attention to common performance enhancment technologies means you'll never go fast enough to NEED those super duper safety features.
I thought all that happened since religion gained a political foothold in the US....
The problem can be summed up in two words: Intolerance and Greed. Those two little words can sum up every problem ever encountered in humanity. Unfortunately this world is riddled with people infected with both.
Oh yeah. Well my father is bigger than your father. Ford sucks and GM rules. ATI out-renders Nvidia any day of the week. AMD kicks Intel's pipelines. Giga-Byte rules and Asus sucks. Buffy could whip Xena with one hand tied behind her back. (how am I doing?)
I would describe a person such as yourself as a lazy, inefficient and piss-poor systems administrator that give us good administrators a bad name and make our jobs much more difficult. You're as bad as the Windows cronies that can't find the time in their oh so busy daily schedule to apply software patches and updates.
Your comparison is absurd. Hot coffee coming out of a camera? Try again. Think more along the lines of someone buying a container of hydrocloric acid for stone engraving. The consumer bought the acid from a company that was been repeatedly warned that the container they distributed the substance in was too weak to contain an acid of that strength. While putting the container in your truck the container literally falls apart in your hands. You get the living hell burnt out of your family jewels. You find out that this company had been repeatedly warned about the health risks from their reckless use of a flimsy container and a dangerous substance. You ask them to pay your medical bills caused by their reckless action. The baulk at you so you sue. You win. The jury is really pissed at the company so they award you many many times what you sued for. This gets reduced significantly later but your still win. Now all you have to concern yourself with are the absolute idiots on Slashdot like SatanicPuppy that think they know why your sued.
It's absolutely a living organism. It lives in the thoughts, words and actions of every individual representative in the UN. It lives in the interpretations of what the UN says and does in all the governments' actions represented in the UN. It's a much a living thing as you and I.
If Iraq and Saddam had actually been involved in a plot to perform terror attacks on the US and the UN was doing nothing then I could understand some unilateral action to defend the US. Since I don't believe that was the case and the Bush clan lied to us from day one about why we were there then I think the UN should be very pissed at us right now.
So you see no reason to block a port that has all but no legitimate use and is being used maliciously?
Why should access to port 25 cost any more than access to all other ports? I use much less bandwidth than the average person, I just happen to like fast and reliable e-mail service. There's no way to justify charging someone more money for port 25 being unblocked.
So you believe outbound SMTP shouldn't be blocked for anyone because you use it for legitimate purposes? That doesn't make any sense. If 99% of the people don't use it for legitimate purposes and 90% of the people are infected with viruses like SoBig and are being used to send spam (thus causing more of our netblocks to be blacklisted) then why should we allow anyone to use it? Not blocking it would be irresponsible.
Why don't you block port 25 by default, and unblock it for anyone who asks? That would almost completely solve the problem, while not screwing over your customers.
This would be an elegant solution if it were possible, which is isn't (at least in the case of any ISP issuing dynamic IPs). If we issued static IPs to our many thousand customers we could do something like this, although it would be an administrative nightmare. All our business customers (merchants, school districts, work-at-home folks wanting business speeds or needing a static IP get a static IP or netblock. Everyone else gets a dynamic IP just like all the other providers. Sure we could parse the radius logs for userids and the NAS port or assigned IP, figure out which AS they are connected to, and script the addition of an ACL to permit outbound SMTP on a per user basis. Then again I can all but gaurantee that it would never be used by any of our customers (sad, it would be nice though). Perhaps Cisco or some other company would come up with a slick way to do this. I'm sure it would be something proprietary and would require an end to end Cisco solution (like one of the wireless management products they demoed to me a few years ago).
You're quite lucky I'm not a customer of yours, or I would be raising hell like you couldn't imagine. Then I would switch to another ISP that doesn't place arbitrary restrictions on my connection, mainly designed to seperate me from more of my money.
You sound like one of the people we'd rather not have as a customer. If you were one of our customers and didn't like our service you'd be more than welcome to terminate your contract and switch to another provider. Oh wait, I forgot, we're the only show in town. Opps, not just this town but the 30 telephone exchanges we own. I suppose you could make a long distance call to AOL or Juno if you really don't like our service.