Everything is Broken

Dropbox for offsite backup

I’ve recently been using Dropbox. Its a free offsite backup service, which works with Windows, Linux and Mac and gives you 2Gb of space for free. You can pay for more if you need it. Here’s what I like about it:

• It just works. Drop your files into a folder and forget about it.
• You can join more than one computer to the same account and the files sync between both computers. eg one at work, one at home.
• If you’re away from you computer and you need a file, you can get it from the web interface. (But of course you’d only do this on computers you trust
• There are different levels of privacy. Private files are only seen by you. However you can share files with certain people, by supplying their email addresses. You also have Public files which can be downloaded by anyone at all with the given URL. Much more control than senduit.com for example.
• Photos put in the photo folder are instantly made into galleries. Neat.
• You can roll back to a previous version of a file if you make a mistake.

Having said all that, I wouldn’t trust super secret work or personal documents to it, but for keeping a backup of photos and non-sensitive personal docuements, it works a treat.

Also, there’s a referral program on at the moment, so if you sign up via the link below, you get an extra 250Mb of space. And so do I as well … go on … its free, and you’ll be glad you did.
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTI3NDkwMDk

Posted in General IT, Security | 2 Comments »

PLDT SMTP server.

Man this is the best kept secret in the entire telecoms industry … I’ve been trying to send email through PLDT’s SMTP servers as I’m a broadband customer of theirs, and my normal SMTP server wasn’t working. I needed to get an email out, and I was getting a little desperate.

So apparently the published SMTP servers don’t actually work. Yay! If you try looking on the PLDT website, where you might expect to see this kind of useful information … well just don’t bother. You get seasick pretty quickly from all the flash whoopiness, and the dead ends and 404 start to piss you off after a while. So then you do a few google searches and come up with a couple of published servers, which basically don’t work: smtp.info.com.ph and smtp.pldtdsl.net

So, eventually I cracked and went to the Customer Hotline. After re-phrasing my question several thousand times until I was understood, the answer was … smtpdsl4.pldtdsl.net , using port 587. Which actually works.

Port 587, yes of course, why didn’t I guess that one.

Posted in General IT, Philippines | 2 Comments »