I’ve had quite a few problems connecting to the net via my cell phone, the Sony Ericsson T630. It connected nicely to the net, got its IP address from the DHCP server and right DNS settings. But it seemed that the requests didn’t go any further than the gateway, and stopped there. So all settings seemed ok, but the packets just met the wall.

After doing some research I finally found out why. Under the account settings for GPRS, the access point was meant to be ‘internet’ instead of ‘wap‘. After making that change, everything worked without a problem. Ok, I have to admit the speeds were terrible! Abysmal to say the least, but what else can you expect when you’re used to broadband on a daily basis. It’s not like speed are important anyway, the only reason you do connect via wireless is because you need to. You might be expecting an important e-mail, or you’re waiting to settle an important bid on an ongoing auction. The reasons could be many, and it’s nice to be able to do your stuff wherever you are, as long as you have your laptop and cell phone handy.

Sometimes you get stuck with some problem that you just can’t figure out. Your server is up and should work perfectly, but does it? Hell no, there is some odd error that you just can’t figure out. In my case, it was a problem with my mail server. I could send mails, but no way in hell was I able to get any mails. At first, I thought the problem was my spam filter that stopped them, but looked through the logs and couldn’t find anything. But then I got to think of something. The domain my private server is on, does not use a real host. It uses what is defined as a CNAME, which means it points to another domain name. So what happened was that whenever someone tried to mail me, the mail got to my server but was rejected as being to the wrong domain since most e-mail clients translates the domain name into it’s real name. So all I had to do to get it working, was to enable my mail server to accept mails for that domain and everything worked like a charm.