[lug] Q. on AT&T broadband

[Bear Giles]

> Does anyone here with AT&T broadband have static IP and handle your own
> email directly (assumes you own a domain name)?

They used to unofficially support static IPs, but I think that has
stopped.  AFAIK you're SOL wrt your own domain, etc. 

However, as far as policies go they seem to be reasonable if
you're competent enough to pull it off.  They use standard protocols -
no undocumented extensions only supported by a branded version of MSIE -
and they're friendly to Linux/*BSD people using a Linksys box to handle
to DHCP negotiations.  They don't block outbound port 25, so you can
run your own outbound mail spool.  I'm also running my own DNS resolvers
since I had some problems with the @home DNS servers disappearing without
notice.  I'm currently using a basic dialup account for my website and 
inbound mail, but hope to switch that to a colocated server RSN.  Once 
we have a box colocated, we may be able to offer cheap hosting for 
others with broadband access and enough technical knowledge to not need
handholding.

Finally, they seem to have finally grasped that I (and others) will 
never use their ISP services -- and adjusted their response templates
to accomodate us.  In contrast, I got the impression that Qworst DSL
had the attitude that you WILL use MSN, you WILL use their resources,
and you WILL enjoy it.

Unfortunately, you can't really run public servers on your home
box because the IP address may change (it doesn't happen often
since it seems to be tied to the MAC address, but it does happen).
They also explicitly test for NNTP servers, although that may have 
stopped after the conversion from @Home to @attbi.

> How does the latency of AT&T broadband compare to 56k (not bandwidth,
> 56k just sucks, but latency is generally good)?

It's normally pretty good.  Not great, and it can really suck if
a MSTD is making the rounds, but overall it hasn't been a problem.

Bear