DIY web and smtp/pop3 hosting problems

I started out with IIS and a 3rd party smtp/pop server on my desktop. Problem was, I'd go away for a few hours and come back to a tower beaten into submission by someone who found ports 80, 25 and 110 open for use. These are the ONLY ports open for use to the internet. I'm sort of new at this, but instead of trying to figure out what was going on and fix it I devoted my time to something else and gave up. Well, not I have that time back and I'd like to figure out how to accomplish what I wanted to do in the first place: run web and mail services on my tower without getting slammed by port sniffers who'll bash my computer to hell and gone all the time. Am I living in a pipe dream, or is there really a way to do this without spending huge amounts of cache?

I use a DLink wireless switch/router with a built in hardware firewall. I'm running WinXP Pro with IIS installed, and I was running a mail server called "The Email Sever". All of this was running on a DSL connection and I set up my DDNS dealy with dyndns.org. I'm using AVG's AV, and Zone Alarm for my software FW on the tower.

Since I'm new to this whole AO dealy, can someone tell me how to put a custom avatar in my profile? The avatar editing page didn't seem to have that option. Thanks ~_^

What 3rd party app - What OS, What type of connection, What Av software?

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Originally posted here by thejimp
Since I'm new to this whole AO dealy, can someone tell me how to put a custom avatar in my profile? The avatar editing page didn't seem to have that option. Thanks ~_^

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Welcome to AO, thejimp. When you log in you will see the default avatar, click on it to change it or scroll down to 'Member Functions' on the left and click 'Edit Your Avatar'. You can only choose predefined avatars available. To upload your own avatar you need to have atleast 10 post under your belt. I hope this would help.


One thing more, Rather than posting many times you can edit your earlier post by clicking the "Edit" button at the top of your post. Like I did.


- :S:

:Singh:, thanks for the avatar info. I've cleaned up my posts on this thread so it's not so messed up. Hopefully I can get all the help I need from this post. Thanks again.

Have a look through the logfiles of IIS and your mailserver. Something in there might give some cluess as to what was going on.

One (simple) thing I can think of is your mailserver might be configured as an open relay. If that happens spammers will quickly find you and abuse your mailserver.

Definitely check the mail server... as for the web server, I'd throw apache on there and see if you like it better, I know IIS has the microsoft stigma attached to it....


Look at your logs, you may have to just block out certain IP addresses/blocks/hosts.

I've had similar problems with www.d0ppy.com , especially with mail, but I finally got the mail straitened out. I'm not fixing the site until I have a better server to throw it on.

Thanks, guys for the info... I've looked at my logs and what I found was people either making themselves as anonymous as they can (most of the hits were from Asia), or China doesn't like me a lot! I never thought of using Apache, so I'll try that, too. Is there an email server out there I might consider using which I can force authentication for every action on? I thought I had that figured out on "The Email Server", but I guess I was wrong.