Global Reproductive Health IT Support list

["Jojo Almario" <jalmario AT intrahealth.org>]

I just wanted to share an experience we have just had with Terracom..or is it Rwandatel now…it has changed too many times now.  Anyway, in the past they have had a habit of changing things on the fly without much warning to the customers (DNS records, PTRs and such), but they have always been agreeable to work with us to correct any mistakes and they have been extremely courteous and helpful in solving any problems. 

 

Recently, we upgraded the bandwidth to one of our offices in Kigali.  They also mentioned that we would need to change the ip address to our public interface.  The actual change over was painless and quick and all router traffic to the internet and through our VPN went through fine.  After a day or so, we were notified that email was not able to go out to outside domains.  We checked our Exchange queues and for sure they were backed up with mail for other domains.  We went through almost every tool in the book to troubleshoot our Exchange server, but none of the changes alleviated the problem.  We broached the subject of blocking of port 25 since we actually couldn’t telnet to port 25 to any outside servers other than the Terracom mail server .  Terracom claimed they do not block port 25, but it was the only thing left that we couldn’t rule out. After much back and forth they checked with their Satellite carrier provider New Skies.  It turns our they do block port 25 on new ip addresses as a default.  Terracom was able to request an unblock and finally the mail emptied out if the queue rather quickly.

 

If you have a presence in Kigali and make any changes to your WAN infrastructure, I highly recommend double checking all of your resources to make sure it all works.  The ISP is willing to work with you but they will need a lot of communication from you to get things done.

 

I suppose this story isn’t different from any others out there, in any other third world country, but it seems lately that Terracom has had to double check a lot of its settings latetly where one time they were pretty consistent.

 

Thanks for listening

 

Jojo