I'm fighting with my ISP, Cox@Home, over internet access. They've blocked incoming ports 25 and 80, so people can't run servers. Well, I run quite a few 'servers', so this effectively screws me hard. Here's what I'm doing to get things working again:

• Running an SSH tunnel from a server not on Cox@Home's network for port 25. So all of my mail is going to the remote server, the coming down the SSH tunnel to get to my server. This screws with a lot of stuff having to do with spam filtering, but at least it's still up.
• Using Apache's mod_rewrite to redirect web requests. This is really fun. Basically, whenever someone goes to http://www.sunset-cliffs.org (aka naranja.sunset-cliffs.org), they automatically get redirected to http://observer.sunset-cliffs.org:88 using the following rewrite rules:
  • RewriteEngine On
  • RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://observer.sunset-cliffs.org:88/$1 [R]
  Basically what the rule does is to
  1. match any text after the server name,
  2. and save the text you match (^/(.*)).
  The second half of the rule is to send it to the remote server, with the $1 at the end meaning "retrieve the text you saved previously from #1, and put it here". The [R] tells mod_rewrite to serve up the HTTP code 302, meaning "moved temporarily". Ralf Engelschall, the guy who wrote mod_rewrite, has an entire page dedicated to mod_rewrite here: http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/#ToC23

Yes, I'm looking for a new ISP, but it's a pain in the ass to find cheap good bandwidth.