Demon.Service FAQ v2.0.5 ------------------------ Changes in content are marked with a # This is Part 1 mainly facts, Part 2 demon.service culture [oxymoron] will follow as a separate document. Please send any contributions to faqer@corixia.demon.co.uk 1.0 What is demon.service? 1.1 What is demon.service for? 1.1.1 Health Warning 1.1.2 Posting Level 1.2 Official/Unofficial postings 1.3 Message of the Day and status@gate? 1.4 Demon.announce 1.5 Expansion Plans 1.5.1 Netherlands 1.5.2 France 1.5.3 USA 1.5.4 Where next? 1.6 Group Manners, or how to avoid getting toasted 2.0 Connecting to Demon 2.1 A ROMP across the UK 2.1.1 PoP's, vPoPs and ROMPs? 2.2 Why does it reject my password? 2.2.1 Have you changed your password? 2.2.2 RADIUS failure 2.3 Bad Modems/Lines 2.4 Contacting Demon 2.4.1 Technical Support 2.4.2 Changing Demon's records 2.4.3 What information to give 2.5 Abuse of Demon, the service and the Internet 3.0 News 3.1 The newsborg, past and present 3.1.1 Why? 3.1.2 How? 3.1.3 Implications for the user 3.2 What does the response code xxx mean? 3.3 Is news part of the TAM Account? 3.4 Access to Demon's news servers 3.5 Pubnews 3.6 Article expiry policy 3.7 Spam and trollers in the demon.* newsgroups 4.0 Mail 4.1 Machines 4.1.1 Post 4.1.2 Punts and Relays 4.1.3 What are MX records? 4.2 I've lost mail! 4.2.1 Internal delays at Demon 4.2.2 What can I do? 4.3 Bounces 4.3.1 Demon & your mail 4.4 Sticky mail 4.5 Corrupted Envelope 4.6 POP3 v SMTP 4.6.1 Why do Demon use SMTP? 4.6.2 Advantages of SMTP (as implemented by DIS) 4.6.3 Advantages of POP3 4.6.4 Which is best? 4.6.5 POP3 service 4.7 Anti-Relaying 5.0 Connectivity & Routing 5.1 Why can't I connect to ... 5.2 Bandwidth out of Demon 5.2.1 US 5.2.2 Europe 5.2.3 Telehouse & the LINX 5.2.4 Peering 6.0 Other Services 6.1 Are Demon going to provide....? 6.1.1 Quake Server 6.1.2 57.6k modem support? 6.1.3 Blocking mechanisms for email spam? ===== This FAQ has been put together, to answer some of the frequently asked questions, from titbits of information gathered from both listening on the various demon.* groups and reading Demon Internet (DIS) documents. I have no inside knowledge of Demon's network or organisation other than what could be gathered by anyone else. It was written in order to answer some of the more common questions about DIS on demon.service. Disclaimer This FAQ is provided as is without any express or implied warranties. While every effort has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this article, the author assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. ===== 1.0 What is demon.service? -------------------------- 1.1 What is demon.service for? Demon.service is simply a place to sound off about the level of service provided by Demon Internet. It is *NOT* a support group and you cannot *expect* a reply from a Demon employee here. However a number of people from Demon post regularly in answer to service issues, mainly in their own time. 1.1.1 Health Warning Demon.service has a very high flamage content, many of the regular posters are "robust" in expressing their views. Before coming to demon.service it is well worth checking your facts first and making sure that your own set-up isn't at fault. 1.1.2 Posting Level The level of posts is a pretty fair indicator of the state of *.demon.net a high level usually means either something is suffering major problems or the censorship debate is back. An abnormally quiet demon.service usually means that news is broken, again. 1.2 Official/Unofficial postings Among all the other regulars in demon.service there are a large number of postings from demon.net. Unless stated otherwise these people are posting their own views and not DIS policy, but because of their position within DIS they can often can give an insider's view on what's happening. The only time postings from anyone at Demon can be taken as official is if they are either cross-posted to demon.announce or specifically flagged as being official. 1.3 Message of the Day and status@gate? Demon have a couple of mechanisms for alerting their users to problems within the network. The motd (message of the day) is a short (2-3 lines) message which is normally displayed on login (depending on the dialler used). It gives short descriptions of the network status (e.g. News feed halted, punt-4 down, etc.). Status@gate.demon.co.uk is for longer (more technically based) comments on any current problems with the network. The value of these sources varies. Both messages can be obtained by fingering motd@gate.demon.co.uk and status@gate.demon.co.uk respectively. The date stamp on the motd refers to the last time the motd was updated. 1.4 Demon.announce Demon.announce is the moderated newsgroup where Demon make announcements on problems being experienced, changes to the service and various press releases relating to Demon Internet Ltd. This is the one group that it is recommended every customer takes since all major changes to the network will be announced within the group (for example the launching of new services or changes to the network which require configuration changes at the users end.) In addition to the newsgroup, demon.announce is available via the Demon website and via a mailing list. To subscribe to the mailing list send a message to majordomo@demon.net, with subscribe announce in the body of the message. The subject line is ignored, in the event of both news.demon.co.uk and www.demon.net being inaccessible for any reason an alternative source is 1.5 Expansion Plans DIS have a policy of expansion into Europe, at the moment they are active in the Netherlands and France but are also looking at Germany and Belgium. It is possible to logon to the Demon network from any active PoP by using the Fully Qualified Domain-name (FQDN). (e.g. nospam.demon.co.uk, not nospam) 1.5.1 Netherlands At the moment DIS have a fully operational service in the Netherlands, running under the demon.nl domain. This operation has its own news and post system which is not accessible to demon.co.uk customers. In other words if news.dcu is down you cannot connect to news.demon.nl (The reverse is also true) The Netherlands operation is quite happy to accept sales from the UK. There is at least one case where someone had their first choice of name taken but was able to get the name from demon.nl. You can email sales@demon.nl or have a look on-line at http://www.demon.nl/ENG/dinlonls.html for more information. 1.5.2 France The French operation is currently being set-up but no start of service dates have been released yet. It should be noted that information about this has been sparse to almost non-existent for quite some time. 1.5.3 USA The little birdies flying round Finchley are busy with their compasses, it appears that Demon do have plans to provide access numbers in New York. Probably based in their space at Telehouse NY, apparently the equipment is in place but do not have a telco to connect to yet. More news as it becomes apparent. 1.5.4 Where next? While nothing has been announced or mentioned it's a pretty fair bet that Demon are looking at other countries in Europe. 1.6 Group Manners, or how to avoid getting toasted Some simple guidelines for surviving in demon.service, the easiest is scan the group before posting. It's often the case that any given subject is being discussed already or there's a healthy flame war rumbling on. Don't follow up to spam, especially cross posted spam. The spammers rarely read the group they post to and following up simply has the effect of annoying people across several groups. Not just d.s 2.0 Connecting to Demon ----------------------- 2.1 A ROMP across the UK Prior to 1995 Demon's dial-up access points were formed by having a Unix machine with a bank of modems and a leased line to Finchley at each PoP. In late 94/early 95 the first vPoPs (virtual points of presence) were created after a deal was signed with Energis. This deal allowed Demon to host the computers at Finchley (allowing easier access in case of problems) whilst still providing local call access. The vPoP system has since been expanded to provide 100% coverage of the UK and has been split into a number of ROMPs (Regionally Organised Modem Pools). At the time of writing the ROMPs in operation are Energis ROMP COLT ROMP Orange ROMP The COLT ROMP has two numbers (one 0845 and one 0171) and the Energis has 59 (One 0845 and 58 local area numbers). The Orange ROMP has a single number. It is worth noting that the 0845 (as well as the 0345 & 0645) numbers are defined by Oftel as being local call numbers. However some telecommunication companies may charge them at a different rate. Demon no longer user Mercury to provide any of the vPoP numbers for the network, however some of the numbers formerly provided by Mercury are returning the busy signal or nonsense recorded messages rather than number unobtainable. Demon have introduced a New ROMP supplied by Cable and Wireless[CW or C&W] who own Mercury the 0845 301 1666 number also uses 3COM [ now includes USR ] which currently supports x2 and will support V.90 2.1.1 PoP's, vPoPs and ROMPs? In an attempt to clarify the situation with the different types of access number Demon are trying to standardise the definitions The definitions PoP tPoP vPoP have fallen into disuse as Demons infrastructure consolidates. - a ROMP is a set of not-modems (modems that are not really modems) with one or more phone numbers; there are currently 4 ROMPS in the UK and one in the Netherlands; - a PoP or vPoP is one of the phone numbers on a ROMP (while the COLT ROMP does have a number that is correct for its physical location, that's not really important). The rPoPs in the Netherlands have been withdrawn; there is now just one ROMP with about 100 phone numbers. The O845 numbers are charged at local rate by British Telecom, this may not be the case if your local telephone supplier is not BT. It would be a good idea to check how much your non-BT supplier charges for calls to 0845 numbers 2.2 Why does it reject my password? More of a historical problem, usually caused by one of two problems changing your login password and failures in the RADIUS password databases. 2.2.1 Have you changed your password? If you change your password, then the new password should take effect pretty quickly (~30 seconds). However, if it doesn't it is probably due to a large number of changes backlogging the server. Try again later (60 minutes should clear even the worst backlog). If it still doesn't work, call support. 2.2.2 RADIUS failure The RADIUS database handles all password verification for Demon. From time to time, like all computer systems, part or all of it fails. There are now a significant number of radius servers reducing the chances of a single or multiple crash causing authentication problems. As a general rule of thumb if logins start showing an 'invalid password' message then give up for now and try again later. If you are reasonably sure that the problem is with Demon and is not due to something you have done then report the problem to support. 2.3 Bad Modems/Lines It is a generally accepted fact that within the ROMPs there are some bad modems but finding them among the >5000 modems in the various pools is an exercise in log scanning and luck. So why does it seem that every other modem is bad? Well at busy times, when the modem pools are operating at near maximum capacity, the modems which are more likely to be free are the less reliable ones. Other possible reasons for 'bad' modems can include anything from loose cabling between the users modem and the BT box, rain water in the Telecom ducting or old exchange hardware. However if every modem at Finchley seems to be bad, then it is just possible that there is a problem at your end. Dial-up faults should be reported to either dialup-faults@demon.net or using the form on http://www.demon.net/feedback/dialup-faults.html Include in the report enough of your phone number to identify your exchange, your nodename, which number you dial into and if possible the ascend connected to. 2.4 Contacting Demon 2.4.1 Technical Support There are several ways of getting support. Which to use depends on how bad your problem is and how urgent the fix required is. For problems requiring an urgent resolution the support phone line (0181-371-1010) is the best choice. The support line is manned 365[6] days a year, 24 hours a day. However getting through at peak times is regularly a problem despite attempts by DIS to get ahead of the growth curve. For non-urgent problems then mailing helpdesk@demon.net is the best option, but be aware that the mail backlog is approximately 48 hours so a quick reply is unlikely. You will get an automated response informing you that your mail has been delivered. The best option for most problems is to post to the relevant demon.ip.support.* newsgroup requesting help. Don't guess; .pc is not for Windows problems! For the best guide to the groups the "Which Group FAQ" maintained by Richard Ashton 2.4.2 Changing Demon's records Changes of address should be emailed to sales@demon.net, faxed to (0181-371-1150), or posted to Gateway House. To check what address is currently held on file, you can email sales@demon.net, or call the Sales Department on 0181 371 1234. Your address does matter to Demon, without it they will be unable to send you your copy of DISpatches. If you wish to close your account then you will need to instruct Demon to terminate your account, don't just stop paying. To do this either email accounts@demon.net *from the account you are closing* or send a letter or fax (0181-371-1150) to the accounts department at Gateway House. 2.4.3 What information to give If you are posting a problem report to helpdesk@demon.net or one of the Usenet groups then include as much information as possible. For example, include details of the sites you are trying to contact when reporting routing problems. With connection problems to the PoP's include the PoP being called and the first seven digits of the number you are calling _from_. The better the information you give the higher the chances are of the cause being located. 2.5 Abuse of Demon, the service and the Internet Abuse is generally defined as 'abuse of the medium not abuse on the medium'. Demon will rarely, if ever, intervene in cases where someone is offended by the content of a Usenet post, email or web site. Even though there are AUPs to cover the major areas of the service each case is examined on its merits not on hard and fast rules; additionally Demon reserve the right to take action against abuse as they see fit. The AUPs can be found at http://www.demon.net/connect/aup/ At the time of writing receipt of reports is acknowledged by means of an auto-responder, no further correspondence will be entered into unless more information is required *by Demon*. If you want more information on how things are progressing, tough. However it is said that all reports are read and further action is said to be taken where appropriate. Reports of abuse of mail or Usenet by a Demon customer or abuse through the Demon mail relays or news servers should be backed up with copies of the message and _all_ the headers. Abuse by external sources of Demon's mail relays has now been blocked, there is a more detailed description of the effects and implications in the mail section of this document. 3.0 News -------- 3.1 The newsborg, past and present 3.1.1 Why? Demon long ago reached the point where a single news machine could not cope with the demand being placed on it with, at the time, up to 400 users collecting news, posting articles and forwarding news out of the Demon network into the rest of the net. 3.1.2 How? The first solution settled on by Demon was to split the server across a cluster of synchronised machines. The only supported name for the news server is news.demon.co.uk, this is a CNAME for news.news.demon.net which in turn is a name with 4 A records pointing towards the news machines called news-1.news.demon.net, news-2, etc. Each of these machines had its own news spool which had to be kept in sync with the other machines, to maintain this the feed would throttle as soon as a problem occurred on any of the machines. Another machine (peernews) handled the articles passing to and from the external news peers. This approach proved to be incapable of handling the load. The news system has undergone another redesign based round a central news filesystem accessed by the various machines over NFS. The news-feeding machines take postings from Demon customers and the newspeers and feed them into the main news spool on the NFS disks. The customer facing news machines (nnrp-1, nnrp-2 etc) then access this filesystem. However this should only be accessed as news.demon.co.uk not by the individual names. Feeding articles out to peers and accepting articles from peers is handled by the peering servers, I understand that there are at least three machines filling this role, in Holland, Telehouse UK, and Telehouse US. nnrp-1 - nnrp-2 -| nnrp-3 ----- NFS spool --- Spool Manager --- peernews server nnrp-4 -| ^ nnrp-X - | | >>>-----------------------------------------------+ Only the spool manager has the authority in this configuration to add or remove articles from the spool. The nnrp machines read this common spool and feed articles out to the connections made to them. 3.1.3 Implications for the user The primary effect seen is that news will never appear instantly on demon's servers when posted to news.demon.co.uk, due to the split nature of the server. No single box forms the machine known as news.demon.co.uk, therefore none of the customer facing machines has control over the newsspool. The delay is the time it takes for the article to be passed from the customer-facing box it was injected at to the peernews server, and thence back to the Spool Manager. 3.2 What does the response code xxx mean? The standard response is RTFRFC (Read the f* RFC) but for here are the five most common error codes. For the full list, please refer to RFC977 400 Server Busy This code is returned when all the machines in the cluster are operating with the maximum number of connections. This used to be a very common message before the scalable system was rolled out. Now it's only likely to be seen if one or more of the machines are removed from the cluster. 430 Article unavailable It is quite normal for the odd article to be unavailable. For example if a cancel message is sent the article's message ID will be left in the history file but the article itself will be deleted. 502 Access Denied This is usually caused by not having reverse DNS lookups enabled. 503 internal program fault The customer facing newsserver you connected to is broke. If you reconnect, you'll (probably) get a different one, and it'll work fine. Demon's internal monitoring should pick one up within 10 minutes or so, and the fix shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes, so it's probably not worth reporting. If you do report it, saying which nnrp engine you connected to would be worthwhile. -1 (returned by some software only) This indicates that the news server is too busy to return a NNTP status code before closing the connection. Some software has problems with this resulting in memory leaks and the like. 3.3 Is news part of the TAM Account? The official line at the moment is no. News is provided as a bonus service and the machines are not part of the supported services. In other words if news dies horribly then Demon will do their best to get it up and running in as short a time as possible. OK, so why do Demon provide news then? There are two obvious reasons - the first being simply that they would lose business without it. The second is a matter of external bandwidth. With news.demon.co.uk Demon can put high bandwidth ethernet connections in place to handle the traffic. At this time I would estimate that anything up to 4000 people can access news simultaneously. Without news.demon.co.uk all those users would clog up the external links hunting for the various public access servers round the world. News is an unsupported service, originally news was not a supported service. Around the time of the 2nd Great News SNAFU, news became "officially" an unsupported service. 3.4 Access to Demon's news servers Users of demon.co.uk can access news.demon.co.uk from the Netherlands but will be barred from connecting to news.demon.nl and vice versa. While this is less efficient on bandwidth it removes the need for subscribers to mess around with their configurations when moving between the two domains. 3.5 Pubnews There are two pubnews servers, pubnews.demon.co.uk and pubnews.demon.nl, these are both accessible to the outside world. Pubnews.demon.co.uk is a read-only server in its current incarnation, it is unlikely this will change thanks to the abuse which has been made of the service in the past. Each is operated and under the control of their respective arms of Demon Internet. Access limitations can be put into place by the management at any time or on the request of the admins of another network (JANET has been an example of this). As with news.demon.co.uk it is an unsupported service which is provided for the benefit of the net, unlike news it is often withdrawn without any notice for any reason for any length of time. As a general rule questions of when will it be back can be answered with a simple "Sometime soonish, maybe" 3.6 Article expiry policy The news expiry policy is currently under constant review as additional capacity is added to the NFS spool on the customer facing news machines. Changes to the expiry times will be posted to demon.announce and Demon have announced that a web page will be operational in the near future giving more detailed information on the current expiry times. The expiry times on alt.binaries.* and *warez* were dropped solely due to the disk space used. At the time of writing there is no commitment to any change to this but it is subject to review. Due to a major abuse of pubnews.demon.co.uk (the attempted posting of an 84Mb article) a limit of 1Mb has been placed on the size of any article being posted to news.demon.co.uk and pubnews.demon.co.uk. Demon reserve the right to alter this limit and place further restrictions on the service at any time. 3.7 Spam and trollers in the demon.* newsgroups Both are a problem across the whole of usenet but they seem to be felt more keenly in the demon.* groups due to their local nature. Demon allow the propogation of their internal groups to everyone who wants to receive them, resulting in a wide spectrum of readers. The downside is that spammers spraying their junk across the whole of usenet manage to score hits on the demon groups. Trollers from various places, can wreak their havoc from afar, the most easily spotted of the Troll life forms is the Keegan entity. Advice: ignore the spam and the trollers if you can, it's really not worth getting involved. As for cleaning up the mess left by the spammers there is some work being done on a voluntary basis by Mrs Mopp (http://www.mrsmopp.demon.co.uk). She publishes her cancels in demon.tickets for analysis by those who like that sort of thing. 4.0 Mail -------- 4.1 Machines There are three groups of machines that form the mail service provided by Demon. These are post, the punts and the relay machines. To check for mail waiting on the punts finger @post.demon.co.uk (e.g. finger flyhmstr@post.demon.co.uk would give a list of mail waiting for Mark) Long finger output is back, to use the service finger nodename+@post.demon.co.uk is the long version finger nodename@post.demon.co.uk is the short version The same details are available by telnetting to pop3.demon.co.uk on port 666 with your nodename and POP3 password. 4.1.1 Post Post is the Demon smarthost, it is now made up of a cluster of machines. You may choose to send mail to an address on the Internet via Post. The major advantage of this is that when connecting to slow links post will keep trying for long after you've come off line. The disadvantage of this is that mail can be delayed if post is very busy or that mail could potentially be lost if the machine processing your mail completely trashed its discs. To date this has not happened. Mail should not be sent using the punts, relays or any other Demon machine as a smarthost. 4.1.2 Punts and Relays The punts are now split between the Finchley and Telehouse NOCs to provide a more robust service. This split should not affect how mail is delivered. During any major outage mail will either be received by the remaining punt or should be stored by the sending host until delivery can be made. All the mail machines are now on their own subnet, this change should not affect most users but those connecting through a firewall will need to alter their configuration. More details on this should be obtained via the normal support channels. As I understand it the mail machines now have a preferred naming scheme, which is slowly being moved towards: -.mail.demon.net or: relay-.mail.demon.net where is either post, punt, or relay is either 1 or 2 (for telehouse or finchley) is a number. Thus we have: post-10, post-20, punt-11, punt-20, relay-5 etc. post class machines do smarthosting. punt class machines deliver mail to *.demon.co.uk relay class machines do mail rewriting, relaying onto leased line customers, etc. Demon insist that mail can only be assured if you refer to the machines as post.demon.co.uk. Using one of the IP addresses as some broken or unsupported software demands is *VERY* unwise as the IP addresses can and do change regularly. If you use a fixed IP address for mail, your mail *will* fail at sometime in the future. Microsoft Exchange users should note that Demon do not support Exchange. Further, they should ensure that their TCP/IP stack is properly setup and that they do not use a dotted quad IP address eg. [158.152.1.222] when configuring Exchange for SMTP. Exchange users should also ask about solutions in demon.ip.support.nt 4.1.3 What are MX records? For each Demon node there is a series of MX (Mail Exchanger) records. These indicate the machines to which mail should be delivered for forwarding to the node. A typical record might give the machines as flyhmstr.demon.co.uk MX 1 10 punt-2.mail.demon.net flyhmstr.demon.co.uk MX 1 10 punt-1.mail.demon.net The MX records can be checked by fingering yournode.demon.co.uk@post.demon.co.uk or by visiting http://http.demon.net/external/ntools.html 4.2 I've lost mail! This is a rare cry but one which does appear occasionally, as a general rule mail is not lost. However there are several things which can look like lost mail. 4.2.1 Internal delays at Demon Periodically there are problems with the way the Demon mail system operates. In the past International connectivity problems have caused massive backlogs to appear in a short space of time. The delays resulting reached anything up to 6 days and much of the mail being reported as lost did re-appear. 4.2.2 What can I do? The best approach to solving mail problems which are not to do with your own set-up is to get hold of the *full headers* of any bounces and mail them to helpdesk@demon.net. Remember that not all problems are solvable by DIS. For example if the problem is with a mailhost somewhere inside another network there is little that can be done except mailing the postmaster@site and alert him/her to the problem. 4.3 Bounces If mail is undeliverable for whatever reason the RFCs state that it should be bounced, i.e. returned to the sender. Reasons for this may include unreachable hosts, unknown users or a local policy that rejects mail from certain addresses or domains. 4.3.1 Demon & your mail Mail is held on the punts for 30 days before bouncing. After 8 days a warning is sent out alerting the sender that the mail hasn't been delivered. Although these 8-day bounce messages shouldn't cause any problems to mailing lists many list admins use them as a cue to drop list members to prevent 30 days worth of bounces coming down over the following month. Due to the number of 8 day bounces there are a number of lists that no longer accept any requests from *.demon.co.uk. If you know you're going to be away and may have these bounces going out it is only polite to inform the list admin, and unsubscribe, resubscribing upon your return. 4.4 Sticky mail Unfortunately there are times when the automatic mechanism for causing mail to flow fails. There is *no* way to force the punts to deliver. Despite what you may hear, all that commands like "smtp kick" do is to try and deliver any *outgoing* mail. The punt should try to deliver again every 5 minutes, but if this fails the only way to restart the delivery system is to log off and back on again. 4.5 Corrupted Envelope When fingering node@post.demon.co.uk the long output may return a *corrupted envelope* message. This occurs when the finger program is checking mail just as the punt is deleting the mail after a successful delivery. 4.6 POP3 v SMTP This is the subject of a long running holy war across several groups. Both protocols have their advantages, DIS now provide both. 4.6.1 Why do Demon use SMTP? SMTP is the normal method of transmitting email round the internet, as such it is the logical method for delivering mail to an Internet host (which is what the dial-up account is). SMTP also gives a large degree of flexibility. SMTP will remain the normal way to deliver mail to Demon hosts for as long it is the Internet standard. 4.6.2 Advantages of SMTP (as implemented by DIS) 1. Unlimited mailboxes i.e. a user may have as many individual mailboxes as he or she likes. 2. No user interaction is required to collect mail 3. You get the SMTP envelope delivered as well as the body 4. Parallel delivery possible 4.6.3 Advantages of POP3 1. Mail can be checked & read without deleting it from the server 2. Mail can be collected from anywhere around the globe. 3. Mail headers can be scanned [Provided you set your POP3 password (telnet to password.demon.co.uk, login as younodename with your dialup password). As a member of the demon testers group, I can tell you that alternative password setting systems are being trialed] 4.6.4 Which is best? This entirely depends on what you need. If you need mail that can be read from anywhere in the world then POP3 is the logical choice. However if you have a large number of users or require extra addresses for other services (for example a listserver) then SMTP would be a more sensible choice. Just to confuse matters a little it should be noted that some ISP's have 'improved' the normal POP3 system to provide some of the features of SMTP. 4.6.5 POP3 service Connection to the service from outside Demon (i.e. from a cybercafe or another provider) requires a POP3 password to be set, this can be done by telnetting password.demon.co.uk Collection should be made from pop3.demon.co.uk and can be done for either the full mailbox or for a single user by logging on as node or user@node respectively. Outgoing mail should be sent to post.demon.co.uk not pop3.demon.co.uk Another common error is having the return address misconfigured to read name@pop3.demon.co.uk. This will not work and all mail to that address will be bounced. 4.7 Anti-Relaying Demon now have implemented anti-relaying on their mail machines, this has been done to prevent external abuse of those machines. Until the patches were in place anyone, anywhere in the world could connect to the punts or post machines and send an email using them. As a result of this open policy a large number of spammers have been using the punts to send UCE/UBE. Anti-relaying means that any machine connecting to the punts, which is not on the Demon network (ie not on the LAN, a Leased Line or dialup) will have to fulfill one of the following criteria before the mail is accepted for delivery A simplistic view: 1. The mail is destined for a Demon account (ie node.demon.co.uk/demon.net) 2. The mail is for a domain hosted by Demon 3. The mail is destined for a domain where Demon have an agreement to relay. A more complex view: As I understand it, with the exception of post class machines, machines in the mail.demon.net domain will only deliver mail to hosts which they have an MX record for (that Demon know about) An even more complex view: The above isn't quite true either. But I do not understand it. Everything else is rejected, this has the side effect that any Demon customer trying to send mail via a non-Demon connection will be rejected. At this time there is no way to provide authentication to get round this problem. However Demon have said they are working on a work-around to this problem. 5.0 Connectivity & Routing -------------------------- Routing is the mechanism that allows your computer to connect to any of the multitude of other hosts on the Internet. It is normally established very early in the login procedure, but is known to fail occasionally, one way of checking routing is to ping one of the machines in the DIS network. 5.1 Why can't I connect to ... There are many, many reasons why a route to another host cannot be negotiated. Some of the more common ones are: 1. The host is down 2. A link close to the host is down cutting it off from the net as a whole. 3. A link further back has failed and the routing tables haven't adjusted themselves yet. 4. The routing tables have been corrupted somewhere and are causing loops and other problems to occur. 5. The links out of demon.net are suffering problems 6. A problem inside the DIS network. 7. You have an incorrect DNS setting locally. 8. It's Monday and everything feels like playing up. 9. It's Friday the 13th. 10. The Internic have nuked the zone files for .com 11. It's September 5.2 Bandwidth out of Demon 5.2.1 US Connectivity to the US at the time of writing consists of a single DS3 (45Mbit) full duplex . Peering on this line consists of 10Mbit (full duplex) to PSI-Net and connections to Savvis and Exodus. There is currently another DS3 in termininating at a different point to the first both US sites connect to all three peers. This is until such time as the announced 155Mbps Links are operational. 5.2.2 Europe A 34Mbit line now runs from London to Amsterdam, with a further 34M line from Amsterdam to the Amsterdam Exchange point. 5.2.3 Telehouse & the LINX A 155Mbps connection from Finchley to Telehouse into Telehouse at the Docklands. This includes a 100Mbps link into the LINX. Running over a SDH STM-1 link 5.2.4 Peering Current major peering points are The London Internet Exchange (LINX), the Amsterdam Internet eXchange (AMS-IX), the New York International Internet Exchange. Demon have also joined a local New York exchange. The New York peering also includes a link to KDD, a large Japanese provider, Demon also peers with Exodus and Savvis The DS3 terminates in one site NY-IIX the PSI peering is there. The Exodus peering is at a second and Savvis peering at a third. The peering is 'substantial' with Exodus & Savvis. There is considerably more peering out of New York than transatlantic capacity (DS3). 6.0 Other Services ------------------ 6.1 Are Demon going to provide....? 6.1.1 Quake Server Demon have announced the introduction of some games servers including Quake, Quake II, Netstorm, Subspace, Quakeworld, see the newsgroup demon.games and for details. These are *not* supported services. Demon support will not answer any queries about the servers. 6.1.2 56k modem support? At the time of writing there is no agreed standard for speeds of 56k. However Ascend (the makers of the MAX4000 and TNT units Demon use) have made available code upgrades and modem cards which can support the 56kFlex modems. However the x2 standard from US Robotics is not compatible with this protocol and those modems will only be able to connect at the lower 33.6k speed. The entire Finchley ROMP is now K56Flex and V.90 capable but these speeds are unsupported. At the current time it is probably worth buying a 56k/x2 modem that the manufacturer guarantees will be upgradable to the forthcoming V.90 standard no matter what. Note that at the time of writing (August '98) there exists only a draft standard. It is expected that the standard will be ratified in September. for the latest see the demon.tech.modems FAQ posted to that group and demon.answers. [The demon.tech.modem FAQ is in the process of being split with 56K matters having their own FAQ - Subject: FAQ: V.90, K56Flex, X2 v0.4.0 FINAL DRAFT 6.1.3 Blocking mechanisms for email spam? The short answer is "no", Demon provide connectivity to the Internet by the means of self-administered nodes. It is your responsibility as postmaster@ to arrange your own email filtering. Demon will not do it for you. Email address mangling in usenet postings is generally considered to be bad manners but to a large number of people it is seen as the only effective way to block UCE. Care should be taken when mangling addresses, don't mangle the address in such a way that UCE will go to another account or provider eg user@nodename.something.demon.co.uk. All the UCE would end up being directed to something.demon.co.uk, which is at the very least bad manners and against the relevant AUP's Mail filtering is possible using the appropriate software on most platforms. ka9q and WinDIS have built in mailkill capability. For Turnpike It is now possible to reject mail automatically. For SMTP delivery you can reject at the protocol conversation level (when you know who the mail is from or to) or after it has been received (when you can write powerful rules to scan any part of the header or body). For POP3 delivery you can reject after just the headers have been read from the server (Connect reconstructs the "SMTP envelope" at this time) or you can apply the header/body rules as with SMTP. This latter will only fetch the body if it is necessary to do so. It is also possible to reject all mail which is not addressed (in the SMTP envelope) to a known email name at your site. Users of unix variants can configure their MTA to bounce on a number of criteria with minimum fuss. There is also Scanmail, . Which allows the mailbox to be filtered prior to downloading. For more information on fighting spam and what is being done on the Internet as whole about this problem have a look at http://spam.abuse.net Credits ------- (Or I'm not taking all the flak :) Darrell Ottery (Darrell@lspace.org) for proofing and improving on my grammar. Malcolm Muir and Giles Todd for picking up on a few typos and some factual errors. The poor souls who got random emails from me asking for suggestions (You know who you are :) Everyone who mailed me after the first posting with comments and suggestions for improvements, many thanks. Glossary -------- AUP : Acceptable Use Policy CBG : CONNECT but garbage CBNL : CONNECT but no login CBNH : CONNECT login but no HELLO to start session COLT : City Of London Telecommunications DIS : Demon Internet Services DSC : Demon Supporters Club JANET : Joint Academic NETwork MTA : Mail Transport Agent (eg sendmail) PoP : Point of Presence POP3 : Post Office Protocol (Mail collection system) RFC : Request for comments, Ringout : Modem at the far end doesn't pick up the phone line ROMP : A batch of modems with several phone numbers SDPS : Standard Dial-up POP3 Service Spam : Junk email Stalled : Usually taken to mean that the feed from peernews to the newsservers is stopped SDU : Standard Dial-up account TAM : "Tenner a month" Short for the Standard Dial-up account. Also known as TAM+V (+VAT) tPoP : Traditional Point of Presence UBE : Unsolicited Bulk Email (see Spam) UCE : Unsolicited Commercial Email (see Spam) vPoP : Virtual Point of Presence ===== This FAQ was originally written by Mark Lowes It is now maintained by Richard Ashton <{R}@sunshine.tm> Any comments or suggestions about this FAQ or information contained within should be sent to faqer@corixia.demon.co.uk. Comments made to the newsgroup may or may not be noticed, any requests for changes to any section should be at least copied to the contact address. Copyright 1996-8 by Mark Lowes This file may be freely distributed provided that it remains unedited from its current form. It may be printed for personal use only. Sections may be quoted for reference providing its source is given. The latest version is posted regularly to the newsgroups demon.service and demon.answers. {R}