I consider myself fairly web-savvy and have done countless, secure, safe transactions on the Internet for the past 15-years.  But this event totally disregarded my choice to decline their purported service — clicking “No thanks” resulted in a monthly recurring charge from my credit card.  And I can only blame myself for not catching it earlier, but this wreaks of a criminal act.

Well, calling their customer service was no treat either, when you are greeted by “Enter the credit card number that is being billed”.  Yeah, right, like I want to disclose that information to you, when you ripped it off dove-tailing another separate online service to begin with.  I purportedly received a claim number and the last charge will get reversed within the next two business days.  Stay tuned, I have this suspicious feeling this episode ain’t quite over.  Let’s hope my intuition on this matter is wrong.

I started by testing the router’s capabilities by procuring a free host on one of DynDNS’s 88 domains: hurst.homelinux.net. And, it’s always nice to have an extra hostname, for separation of virtual services from each other, such as email and web addresses. That worked out very quickly and easily.

Next, I tested remote access to services I wanted to provide: email, ftp, ssh, imaps, web, and webdav.  I created a new virtual guest running Fedora 12 on my workstation and rewrote the iptable rules to forward the DMZ ports to it.  Again, no issues, because there is no  ISP port-blocking enforced.  Sending outbound mail had gotten a little tricky, because a lot of competing ISPs will block email from residential email servers — even if they have legitimate domains like myself — because it is sent unauthenticated (and probably unsolicited) by Verizon’s network and not their servers.

I discovered I can easily remedy that situation with one-line added in sendmail’s access file:

AuthInfo:outgoing.verizon.net "U:myaccount" "I:myaccount" "P:mypassword" "M:LOGIN PLAIN"

After some testing, this solution turned out to be very painless to implement.

The DNS transfer is very slow, but that is a result of registrar compliance.  It generally takes 5-7 days, with my experience with that being no different.  During the transition, I ran my own Internet DNS service for both of our domains, so I had to keep mine active until it switched over to DynDNS servers.  Once it did, I could safely remove my DNS service from answering queries to hurst-ri.us.  The only restriction imposed by this process is that I cannot do another domain transfer for another 60-days, which should not present any problem for my vanity use of it.

The switchover of our analog phone line to digital was totally seamless, including testing our home alarm system.  The only thing missing was the static on the phones.

Having download speeds of up to 25 Mbps and uploads of up to 15 Mbps — yes, it is true, it is fast.  It’s not about a single download, it’s the fact that I can download a large file and still have a few more usable Internet sessions working without incurring noticeable latencies.  Executing one of those Internet speed tests gauged my connection at nearly 29mbs download / 21mbs upload with only 16ms ping over a 50 mile distance to a Boston-based server.  And I was also downloading a 157mb file at the same time.  Impressive.

The included wireless router is first class.  3 WAN ports: coax and ethernet, 6 LAN ports: ethernet, coax, and USB, and wireless.  Excellent signal strength, I can roam anywhere inside and outside of my property.  Up the street and into a neighbor’s garage — 4 bars of signal strength and the mbs dropped from 56 to 11.

I have one HDTV along with three standard definition TVs, and all are now hooked up with set top boxes.  The picture quality is what you expect, except I have not experience any picture jitters yet.  What improved most noticeably was the numerous functions, responsiveness, and overall friendliness.  Each set top box provides their Guide and Internet Widgets (Facebook, Traffic, Weather, etc.)  Using the DVR remotely from my Blackberry or from any web browser is pretty cool too.  The number of channels in our package (no premium) is impressive, too, although I really don’t want to disclose to my father that I have the Horse Racing channel — he may never leave.

This experience reminds me of how it felt when I got my first cable modem.  And when our local cable company repeatedly promised a next generation of improved technologies and friendliness was coming (this campaign started over 5-years ago), all I got was a small incremental boost in speed — after I paid to upgrade my modem — and shuffling AND reduction of usable cable channels.  Well, cable truly dominated homes these past 25+ years with the last 12+ years including Internet.

I wonder where those carriers and services will be in the next 5 years?

I found the photos and stories there to be quite interesting, but his wife Michelle puts it another way: “I hope this cures your insomnia.”  While I love modesty, it was her opening statement that made me laugh loudly to set the proper mood:

I once mentioned to Fred that I thought it would be fun to take a cruise.  Fred took this to mean “let’s buy a boat and go cruising”.  So, lesson learned. I must be VERY specific when discussing vacation plans with Fred.

Heh, now I know why Fred was so loved.

Farewell to another dot-com era!  Here is a final snapshot of its whois entry:

Registrar WHOIS: Domain Registration Services
Domain Name: MICROWAVESOFT.COM
Registrant:   (377148-DRSS)
ROBERT HURST
   24 FREEDOM ROAD
   PROVIDENCE, RI 02909
   US

   Administrative Contact:     (377149-DRSS)
     Hurst, Robert     r_hurst@microwavesoft.com
     24 Freedom Road
     Providence RI 02909 US
     401-861-3221

   Technical Contact:     (377150-DRSS)
     Hurst, Robert     r_hurst@microwavesoft.com
     24 Freedom Road
     Providence RI 02909 US
     401-861-3221

   Record last updated on:  2008-12-02 20:18:41.0 UTC
   Record created on:       1999-12-04 17:17:15.0 UTC
   Record expires on:       2008-12-04 17:17:15.0 UTC

   NS.MICROWAVESOFT.COM    96.238.18.2
   NS2.MICROWAVESOFT.COM    96.238.18.2

• run on Red Hat Fedora distro
• customized themes and plugins
• must be simple to use

Preferably, it would not need any database services, or at the very least, reference an embedded database such as SQLite. Xaraya came very close to my needs, but I found the pages it rendered ran slowly in my Firefox web browser. Perhaps it was some Javascript, I am not certain. But my Thinkpad processor would remain pegged at 1.86ghz sitting idly on its home page.

Fortunately, WordPress is a supported RPM package in the Fedora repository. Although it does require MySQL, its installation and setup was a breeze. So I will be running this as my root pages for now, and see if sticks.