[54872] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: uunet
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Howe)
Sun Jan 19 16:52:22 2003
From: "Dave Howe" <DaveHowe@gmx.co.uk>
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2003 21:27:37 -0000
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> "Your not my customer I really don't care" *click*
> Nice. professional too.
I had a similar experience with them - even though we *are* a UUNet
customer, we weren't the customer with the problem (in this case, a email
address which was a subdomain of the company's main address was being
rejected by the UUNet mailservers; a simple misconfiguration during a
security lockdown).
after I got a supervisor (phone firewall wasn't even willing to take down
details and didn't know what a MX record was), conversation went something
like:
Me: Hi. I am post admin for $mydomain and I am having trouble sending mail
to emailaddress@subdomain.contractorsdomain via server $uunetinboundmail. it
is being rejected with error <descriptive text that basically says "this
isnt a relay">
Them: you shouldn't be using $inboundmail, you should be using
$mydomain_designated_smartmailhost
Me: I tried that already - it doesnt' matter if it comes from my mail host
or your smarthost, it is still being rejected by $uunetinboundmail
Them: if it is being rejected, then it is for a good reason. perhaps it is
the wrong server for subdomain.contractorsdomain?
Me: that's where the MX record points - and addresses @contractorsdomain are
being accepted by that server just fine
Them: then the MX record must be wrong - why not contact the DNS provider
Me: I am - that is you too. this is one of your customers I am trying to
send email to
there then followed a short conversation that amounted to that - given that
$mydomain was working fine, they would *not* look at the problem for
$contractorsdomain unless $contractor contacted them about it. I found
postmaster@contractorsdomain worked fine, so managed to get *that* guy to
get uunet to fix the problem (and it was literally a thirty second fix).
The standard policy for uunet seems to be that following "the system" is
more important than actually fixing problems, and problems don't even
*exist* unless the customer with the problem notices...... which I find
astonishing. someone *must* have the authority to enter new trouble tickets
if they notice that a router is spitting sparks without having to get the
customer on the far end of that wire to report it for them....
