Last week Nikki and I had Verizon Fios installed in our house. She was looking foward to the TV package and DVR. I was looking forward to 20 megabit upload speeds! That beats the pants off Comcast 1.5 mega bit uploads, especially considering that I almost never got that rate with Comcast. Instead I was typically getting 70 kilobytes up at best (560 kilobits, 0.5 megabit).
Putting the speed aside for a second, Verizon dropped the ball and missed our first installation appointment. Of course they promise to be there somewhere between 8AM and midnight (slightly exaggerated), and they dont do installations on the weekends so you have to take the entire work day off. I was very disappointed when no one showed up the first time. -1 cool points Verizon.
They did make the second appointment and got everything installed without too much hassle. I immediately ran a series of bandwidth speed tests. I consistently got 20 mega bit download speeds exactly as advertised. My upload varied widely from 3 mega bit to 12 megabit. This is probably due to bandwidth on the speed test servers rather than FIOS itself since this is currently an unusually high upload speed.
Once I was sure it was working I went about removing the Verizon router (ActionTec MI424-WR) so I could use my favorite D-Link router in its place. The problem was that the installer had run a coax cable from the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) to the router. I needed ethernet for my D-Link router. No problem, I saw that the ONT had an ethernet jack on it so I ran the cable. Nothing. I did some research and apparently you can have either ethernet or coax, not both. I called Verizon and after about 1/2 on the phone they remotely switched my ONT to ethernet.
My D-Link was now the entry point for internet access for all my computers, just the way I like it. Once the router was sending traffic to the appropriate computers in my house I noticed that my website still wasn’t working.
FTP was working. Email was working. The website just would not work. A quick search on the internet confirmed my fear, Verizon blocks incoming port 80 for residential FIOS customers. That is mega lame; Verizon, you are not invited to my birthday party.
Wow, lot of good that 20 megabit upload speed does now that my website is down. Comcast was slow on the upload but at least they didn’t impose restrictions on my connection. Verizon does offer business packages that dont have port 80 blocked but they are about twice the cost of my current plan and provide 0 additional bandwidth. No thanks.
Now I could host the website on port 81, or 8080 which is a pretty straightforward way around the port 80 ban. You would just have to go to knez.org:8080 in your browser. Well I didnt want to make visitors go through the anguish of typing all those additional letters. Additionally, I have lots of forums posts, typically about vehicles, where I have linked photos of car parts. All these links and photos would be broken since they pointed to just plain knez.org, no port specified. I have no intention of going back and updating all those links.
I started looking around for a solution. There are dynamic DNS services out there that specialize in this sort of thing. The problem is they all cost money as far as I can tell. The best I found was about $40 a year.
Another option was to move my website to some dedicated server and let someone else host it. The problem with that the reason I have a website it keep playing around with web technologies. I want to be able to do whatever I want to the website without worrying about if the hosting server allows it. I want to be able to host whatever content I feel like and have complete control over the site. Having the site hosted was definately not an option.
Ultimately my goal was when someone types www.knez.org into a web browser, to automatically redirect them to www.knez.org:8080. This would bypass the port 80 restriction without requiring the user to type the extra 5 characters. I also wanted the redirection to included the full URL so that links to pictures or specific pages would still work.
This got me thinking about my current DNS provider. They are the ones that translate knez.org into my homes IP address. They provide me with control over my DNS record and as well as URL forwarding. With DNS I can specify knez.org to point to whatever IP address I want. The problem is DNS has nothing to do with ports so it wouldnt help me here.
URL forwarding looked promising as it allows me to specify what return host the user should get when they ask my DNS provider for www.knez.org. I could set it up so that when someone types in www.knez.org they are redirected to www.google.com if I wanted.
I immediately setup URL fowarding so that requests for www.knez.org got sent to www.knez.org:8080. This didnt work at all. The problem with this approach was that I cant forward the knez.org request to a different URL while simultaneously resolving knez.org to my home IP address. URL fowarding and DNS management cant be used simultaneously. Bummer.
At this point I called my brother and we came up with idea that should work. I already owned the knez.org domain name. I would need a second domain name so that I could have knez.org URL forward to this second domain which would resolve to my home IP address.
Surprisingly all other knez.* domain names are already taken. 5 years ago when I started this site everything but .com was available. Weird. I ended up buying kneznet.com for $9 a year.
I setup URL forwarding on knez.org so that when someone requests www.knez.org they are automatically forwarded to www.kneznet.com:8080. I setup DNS on kneznet.com so that any request to kneznet.com resolves to my home IP address. I also setup knez.org so it had MX and A DNS records that pointed to my home IP address.
The end result is that knez.org resolves directly to my home IP address (so FTP and mail still works) while www.knez.org is URL forwarded to kneznet.com:8080 which resolves to my home IP address on port 8080 so my website works despite Verizon’s port 80 block.
All my forums links and photos work just fine. Its everything I wanted while still being cheap and hosted on my computer. There are only two drawbacks to approach.
- http://knez.org no longer works. You actually have to specify www.knez.org or http://www.knez.org.
- When you are redirected from knez.org to kneznet.com:8080 you can see the URL is not what you typed in. I figured it was better to show the new URL then to stealth foward which my add more confusion down the road.
In summary, this was a lot of jumping through hoops to keep my website up and running due to a silly restriction imposed by Verizon. I dont get it Verizon, why offer rediculously fast upload speeds while simultanesouly blocking web hosting but not FTP or Email Servers. I just doesnt make sense to me. | 