[SlugLUG] ISP technical quality (was: Remote SVN Security)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Eric Carter (Ecnassianer at greenstorm.net):

> I'm planning to switch my hosting plan to Dreamhost.com, and I plan to use
> their SVN setup.

Please pardon a digression from your question, which I'll freely admit I'm
not addressing.  (Accordingly, I've changed Subject headers.)

If you do SMTP e-mail at a Dreamhost.com hosted domain, please be aware
that their spam-blocking is just miserably bad.  BALUG (balug.org) has
been there for the past year or so, and I've never seen such utterly
ineffective spam-blocking.  Also, until recently, domains hosted there
did't accept mail to "postmaster" as required by RFCs.  (They've now
finally fixed this.)  One thing they've not fixed, though, is that your
hosted domain's MTA doesn't answer the EHLO or HELO SMTP greeting with 
the correct MX name as required by RFC821 4.3 and RFC2821 4.3.1 -- which
(like refusing mail to postmaster) can cause your mail to be rejected by
other people's antispam setups.

My wife's mail quality took a similar nose-dive when she moved
"deirdre.net" to hosting at TextDrive, Inc., but, even as bad as that
is, Dreamhost is significantly worse.

(In general, when I've taken a close look at the technical quality of
hosted domain services, I've been pretty appalled at how much better
moderately competent Linux hobbyists equipped only with spamd and
postgrey, or similar, do at the ISPs' supposed core competency.  As a
second data point, the professionals more often than not also do a
sloppy job with their customers' DNS, e.g., Dreamhost doesn't bother to
furnish glue records, injuring performance on lookups of NS records.
And Dreamhost also blocks incoming TCP-type DNS queries on port 53, a
novice firewalling error that can cause queries on your domain's DNS to
fail.)