O2 broadband - day one (two?)

So my DSL switched last night. Plugged in the O2 supplied Thomson router, and got a connection instantly. And it's currently over 11mb; I'm fairly sure it will slow down, though, as I am only on an 8mb package.

Had a few issues at first, because I couldn't figure out from the O2 custom firmware on the router how to change the box's IP address and disable DHCP, as I run a 10.x.x.x range instead of a 192.x.x.x, and a custom DHCP server. Got there in the end though.

So far, the only real problem is that they block outbound port 25 if you have a dynamic IP, except to their smtp server. I'm not paying £5 per month for a static. Fortunately, I run my own mail server on an external server, and it was a simple matter to make SMTP run on both ports 25 and 261. Tweak the exim config on my main server to relay via the external server, and Bob's your uncle.

As I'm not paying for a static IP, I've hacked together a simple script to hit this page, check the IP against the last IP stored and drop me an email if it changes. I'll put the script up at some point. If it starts changing a lot, I'll just transfer my domain to DynDNS.


1add daemon_smtp_ports = 25 : 26 to your exim.conf near the top, above the acl_xxx lines