Contrary to what some people would have everyone believe, Microsoft don’t screw up very often. However, when they do screw up, they seem to screw up with style.
This Christmas I was off work from 18th Dec to 28th Dec inclusive – quite a long time and also a bargain, at only 5 days of annual leave for a total of 11 days off work. It was nice to be away from a computer screen, only returning to check email and play a few games. Anyway, I digress.
UPDATE 18th April 2010: Netgear have since released a firmware update for the DG834Gv4 which supports NAT loopback. It took them long enough!
Yesterday I made the decision (read: mistake) to update my Netgear DG834G router (hardware v4, firmware v5.01.09) to firmware v5.01.14 – and, as is the way with these things, it brought trouble. After the upgrade I couldn’t reach www.nikrivers.com from the LAN side of the router.
The problem is caused by the way the router handles traffic coming from an internal IP address and destined for the WAN (i.e. external) IP address. In this situation it requires that the router first transfers the traffic from the internal network to the external network, and then immediately passes it back whilst applying any firewall or routing rules that are relevant to incoming external traffic.
This website is a sort of personal project, rather than a proper blog – the reason I make this distinction is because I usually don’t have anything interesting to say; at least, nothing that would be of any interest to anyone who doesn’t know me.
I’m using Postfix as the mail transport agent (MTA) and Dovecot as the mail delivery agent (MDA), and the mail server will serve just one domain (for now). The domain will be served as a virtual host. This means that the mail users don’t need their own login account on the server, and additional domains can be served in future with minimal changes.
Many thanks go to Raymond Mentjens for his help in fixing a few (actually, quite a few) errors, and for all his feedback while he followed this article. He has also created his own guides in Dutch – so if you read Dutch better than English, you may want to take a look at his site.
Bad Behavior has blocked 250 access attempts in the last 7 days.