Switching ISPs

After several years of rather satisfying service from Telia I decided – on a whim – to switch to Tele2.

Actually, there were a few things that annoyed me on Telia. One was that I didn’t manage to change the machine that was connected to the ADSL connection. I followed all instructions I could find and even called support. All I had to do was switch off the modem for 20 minutes and turn it back on with a new box plugged in. Never worked. Three hours. Still no new IP. Of course, it may have been just me, but that has never stopped anyone from being annoyed before.

The other thing was that I upgraded to 24Mbit/s, paid more, but they didn’t send me a new modem. I also had a feeling that new customers got better deals than me.

So, I switched. The switch was surprisingly painless. The target date was April 30th, and I expected all connections to go down and I’d have to install the new shiny modem I received from Tele2. Nothing of the kind! All of a sudden my dhcp address changed and that was it!

Then my wife started complaining about her mail not reaching her friends. My first suspicion was user error, but then I realized I had set up my qmail mail server to route via Telia’s smtp-server. Doh. I can’t blame Telia for not routing mail from Tele2 customers.

The neat thing about my linux servers is that they never crave any attention. That’s also a bad thing. While documentation is fun of the highest degree, my own network is slightly less than 6 sigma standard in that regard. Luckily I remembered that all I had to do was change the server name in the /var/qmail/control/smtproutes file.

Unfortunately Tele2 have blocked all outbound traffic on port 25. Instead they require mail clients to use port 587 and also to authenticate.

I had received a paper with a user name and password. I also set up a mail account with a new password. Furthermore I spent significant time researching how to shove that into the smtproutes file.

All to no avail. Support closes at 8 pm, but then I’ll try to explain my problem. The support site mentions very little about how to configure an smtp-server, though it does mention a lot about configuring mail clients. They also have a robot help desk service named Sara, where you can presumably ask questions in natural language. She claims to answer questions about internet, broad band and so on. I asked “How can I relay from my smtp server?” and got the reply “Server… Not my thing really. I don’t know much about hardware”.

Tomorrow I’ll bother tech support. That’ll be fun…

–Jesper