The part of the company that handles my DSL sent a repairman out, fifteen minutes later, DSL back, and everything could resume!

I gave him a quick tour of the wire the fiber installer left on the ground outside. I showed him where the terminal is in the basement, and shared the wiring work the other installer had cut off. He said, "I got this," and went to work.

Literally like 15 minutes later he said he was done. We went to the basement and he showed me how he went direct to the dangling wire, skipping the terminal. That's probably fine, as I don't think the one remaining POTS line in the house is actually wired to the terminal, and the old setting had a wire mess there anyway. He weaved it above the other wiring in the area. Then he showed me what the fiber installer should have done. Both wires fit in the hole that was there before; the other installer should have shared, like this guy did.

I said "let's plug it in and see it go," and he said, "oh, sorry, after I did the line check, I plugged it in and waited for the lights on the modem to turn green." All done! He asked me to check the Internet, but I lamented, it's all routing through the fiber right now. I need to do some readdressing for the other equipment, but let me check on my tablet quick. I joined the modem's WiFi, and the Internet was there. I logged into the admin interface on the modem (really the only reason I connect computers to that WiFi) and could see all the healthy signals.

I thanked him profusely. He apologized for the disruption, and rode off into the midday sun, like an Internet hero.

I spent a few minutes readdressing the servers, binding services to the static IP addresses, and then a little redirecting the DNS to the right servers. Little seconds-long blips from the Internet monitor as DNS propagated and it noted the old failed before recognizing the new succeeded. HTTP requests again flowed to the other servers as traffic started hitting the diverse IPs instead of the one DHCP-served from the fiber.

E-mail, as it always seems to be the problem, was flowing in, but wasn't flowing out. I checked for similar error messages to mine on the forums, and they all pointed to port 25 blocking. Most of our consumer connections block port 25 off the ISP network, so you have to route traffic through their mail servers. This is done to reduce the risk of compromised (or malicious) systems becoming portals for UBE or spam e-mail.

It's also one of the reasons I want and use static IPs, as I run a (hopefully and generally) hardened server. With the static IPs, they can turn off the port 25 blocking. My servers will accept mail destined for the domains I host. It'll relay some, as a few people prefer getting e-mail via GMail or other services like that, but want to use our domain names. There's auth and filters and more that go with that. My servers do allow other relaying, but only if you authenticate with one of the very limited addresses configured to allow this.

Still, it didn't work. I reached out to their support a bunch of times. There used to be a self-serve maintenance page for static IP users, but it's gone. I only wanted the replacement page for that, but they don't have one. I reached out again to try to find someone who could help me check the filtering, and ran into many suggestions on how to set up NAT port forwarding, one of whom thought I was suddenly condescending when I tried to explain that was for "into my network, not out of my network." I finally found someone who knew they didn't know, but knew how to direct me to the network repair team. They checked, and my port filter was off. He toggled it back and forth, suggesting, maybe that'll tickle something. It didn't immediately make a difference, so I said I'd check for any other changes that might have been made.

Then I remembered one of the port bindings I had to change. When I changed it, it allowed my system to receive mail (until DHCP changed my address), but, of course, since it was using fiber for a while, it wouldn't forward. I peeked, and it was still using the NAT address on the server, so it was bound to use the wrong network. I changed it to the static IP, and instantly on reloading the e-mail server configuration, traffic started flowing.

I probably could have saved myself many hours of concern and waiting for support, although I hope I educated some more of their support people that some of us care about some of the other Internet details than just raw speed...

Everything seems "back to normal," although I now have two gateways to the Internet. The server still aren't benefiting from the faster fiber service, and won't until they offer (probably "business") service that allows static IPs. The servers also instantly have their "static" IPv6 addresses back (technically they're manually assigned, and the servers continue to get the frequently shifting IPv6 DHCP addesses, too).