The Chatterbox

I must be weird or something...

It's true! I guess I'll finally have to admit that I'm just weird.

You see, I've been sick the last couple of days (finally caught the flu bug that everybody around me has already had) but instead of being less productive I've actually been more productive ! LOL

Seriously. I took some medicine that normally knocks me out and tried to go to be very early last night because everybody agreed that I looked like death warmed over. I went to bed at 7pm and watched Star Trek Enterprise from there, figuring I would fall asleep before it was over.

Turns out I stayed awake through that and a few other shows. I think I finally nodded off around 10pm. Then I woke up around 2:45am hacking and coughing because my medicine had long since worn off. I got up long enough to get some more meds from the bathroom, grab me a small glass of tea to wash it down with and headed back to bed.

Try as I might, I couldn't go back to sleep. In fact I wasn't even tired! I should have been though, having not slept much Thursday night either.

So anyway, I finally decided to get up about 3:10am. I had to play online because there's nothing on the tube that time of the night other than infomercials. So I log on and wade through the mail that had come in since the previous evening. That took about 10 minutes.

As is my normal "morning" routine, I fired up my SSH client to log into each of the servers to make sure everything was running okay. Turns out that a new server that has been having issues getting mail delivered correctly a few ISPs (started out being Verizon, Comcast and a few smaller ones) was again having trouble with Comcast addresses.

It's always a pain when something like that happens, because you can't see what's happening from the other end and the error messages can be vastly misleading. Plus, when the error message points to some sort of DNS problem, but there is no DNS issue according to every other ISP on the planet and all of the testing sites pass it with flying colors it's more than frustrating.

Literally, these kinds of things can be anything from the configuration of the mailserver on my end, to a firewall issue on my end, to a wonky mailserver setting on the other end that I can't see, to a firewall on the other end, to having the new server's IP number blacklisted by that ISP with no way to check to BIND not answering correctly, to the resolv.conf file being wrong, to the hosts file being wrong, to a timing between the two mail servers, to the mailserver mis-identifying itself somehow, to, to, to... You get the idea. There are about 100 things that can produce the same type of error.

So what the hey... I'm awake, it's quiet, I don't have to worry about the phone ringing for hours, so I decided now as good a time as any to really dig into it.

So there I am at 3:30am using Linux's good old MAIL command to type in one line of the mail sending routine at a time to see if I can pinpoint where it's failing in an effort to narrow down the field of possibilities.

Me:telnet gateway-s.comcast.net 25
Answer:Trying 204.127.202.26...
Connected to gateway-s.comcast.net (204.127.202.26).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 sccrmxc23.comcast.net - Maillennium ESMTP/MULTIBOX sccrmxc23 #548

Me:helo mydomain.com
Answer:250 sccrmxc23.comcast.net

Me:MAIL FROM:postmaster@mydomain.com
Answer:250 ok

Me:RCPT TO:postmaster@comcast.net
Answer:250 ok

Me:DATA
Answer:354 ok

Me:Subject: Test Message
Sending a test message.
.
Answer:250 ok ; id=20050227015422s2300516ige

Me:QUIT
Answer:221 sccrmxc23.comcast.net
Connection closed by foreign host.

Now that's what it should when everything is working properly. The problem was that I could get all the way to sending the Subject and Body text, but could never get a 250 ok answer. It would tell me then that their was a TEMPFAIL because the sending domain was not legitimate and it couldn't send the email because they require real domains. And right so!

But if there was a problem with the domain why in the hell did it keep giving me a 250 ok both when I sent the helo and also when I sent the From: email address?

Anyway, I typed all of that by hand probably 30 times this morning between 3:30 and 6am, tweaking little things on the server between each until Comcast's mail server finally started saying Yes, we think you're okay dude, so we'll deliver that mail for you!

As usual, it ended up being one little configuration thing that they apparently have tweaked their server to look for. It's silly, but when mail from a Live server with e-commerce sites on it won't go through reliably to one of the major ISPs, it's something you have to deal with.

Anyway, it's fixed. Again. Hopefully for good this time. But since Verizon required something completely different to get mail going through to them, God only knows if another ISP will chime in wanting me to tweak something else. I'll be watching it of course.

Once I got going today I apparently couldn't stop.

I managed put together about another 35 pages for our web site re-design/merging project. I also did some troubleshooting work for an hour or so when someone was having an issue uploading their Personal Watermark graphic on one of the sites. And answered a ton of mail throughout the day. (Aside: Can you imagine what those folks emailed me last night are going to think if they look at the timestamp on my reply and realize that I was up and working at 3am? LOL)

I also chimed in on several topics on a couple of message boards I frequent. And analyzed a half-dozen or so sites that were having issues or one sort or another to give advice to their webmasters on how to best proceed. And put a new graphics card in my main computer so that I could get some software to install, before removing the card again because I like my old graphics card better. And tinkered on my new Linux system that I built for off-site server backups to keep here in my office. And started the laundry. And washed a load of dishes. And took two showers to wash the germs off of me and help clear out my sinuses. And got a couple of things out in the mail before noon since I (finally!) realized that the 1st is early next week. And read 90% of my Wired magazine that came in the mail yesterday afternoon. And played a few games on the little poker software I bought a few weeks back for my computer.

And wrote this War & Peace novel about absolutely nothing. LOL

Man, I should be wore out! But I'm not.

So yep, we're back to the beginning of the circle. I have to admit that I must be weird...