Perhaps some of you have noticed that NYC Smalltalk Wiki is not operational. Well, perhaps you all out there have not noticed but some of our regulars have. It seems that my ISP has shut all of my ports down. Probably not just me. It probably is now “policy”. This SUCKS !!!
BTW, I have a residential broadband account. It has sustained our wiki for at least 2 years. Are they all starting to do this? So the small people like me can’t run wikis from home. Forget about any independent P2P collaboration. P2P networks will definitely need to rely on super peers which means at the very least folks on business cable/dsl. But wait, some cable providers will give you a business cable account and they will very generously open 2 ports. What a joke.
I wonder what the motivation is. Are they trying to control spam/viruses better? Are the small fries of the world actually really impacting their bandwidth? Is this a money making squeeze to get us all to upgrade to business cable.
Maybe I’m screwing up. My newer NetGear router may be screwing up.
I used Shields UP from www.grc.com to check out my port “stealthness” or not. Unfortunately, Shield Up will only test a range of 64 ports at a time and I have to edit the port forwarding tables on the router as well to be able to test. Needless to say I only tested a couple ranges. I don’t know of a tool that will scan the entire port range. Even if there is such a tool, I obviously would need to connect a box directly to the cable modem. I think. I don’t believe there is a setting in my router to just allow all traffic through. Of course not. Through to where? Traffic has to go somewhere. Well, there is the “DMZ” option but I already tried that with one of my boxes.
All of this is such a hazzle and aggravation especially since it makes me so angry that I have to take time away from playing my guitar to handle this BS.
Action items:
- Need at the very least a backup static site for NYC Smalltalk.
- A link from the site to a url that would access the NYC Smalltalk blogs “Community” category, if possible.
- Spend just a tiny little more time on testing what the issue really is.
- Decide to bite the bullet and upgrade to a business cable setup that would allow me total access to my box. In other words just buy myself out of this hazzle.