Martin @ Blog

My server was offline for a while. Mainly because I did a re-install of the OS on it. My server now runs CentOS 4.2 which is pretty nice for a server OS. I also have it on a desktop computer, but then you notice that some stuff is a little old (such as Gnome) which is rather annoying when you’re used to newer versions of the desktop environment. Thanks to some documentation I made when I installed my server about a year and a half ago, the installation went pretty smoothly, including the configuration of my e-mail,, DNS and Apache. Unfortunately I lost some database information which I didn’t backup properly, but I recovered that using Sleuthkit and Autopsy. I made a complete backup of the database using phpmyadmin, but the because it was sent by the webserver to my browser, some formatting went wrong and the file was unusable for a large part.
We also got a new internetconnection here. It’s provided by a (I think) foundation called ‘Ons Net Eindhoven’ which provides glassfiber-based internetconnections. According to the information we’ve got, the up- and download speed should be 10Mbit/second, but for some unclear reason I get higher speeds. The good thing about this connection is that the speed is good and port 25 isn’t blocked for incoming traffic. Unfortunately, outgoing traffic on port 25 seems impossible. Only connecting to the smtp-sesrver from the provider seems to work, everything outside the ‘local’ network is blocked. This doesn’t seem to be a problem at first sight, but a little detail is that the smtp server of ‘Ons Net’ is using authenticated smtp, so you need a username and password.
Because we live in a apartment which is rented from the Eindhoven student housing corporation Vestide, we don’t automatically get a username and password for that server. I went to the office of ‘Ons Net’ this afternoon, and they told me that eventually we will probably get a username and password, but for the time being we should use a VPN-connection to the university over which we can tunnel our e-mail traffic to the smtp-server of the university. On Windows this is pretty easy to accomplish, but I have to figure out how this should be done on Linux (or Mac OS X). The VPN can either be a IPSec of PPTP, so I think it is possible to get it working on Linux.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2005 at 0:42 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.