stooz wrote:...I'm sorry it hasn't been going well for a few weeks. But I am here now, midnight on a Thursday with a normal days work to go to tomorrow at 7am.
I will back online at 7pm after work, carrying on with repairs and improvements once I've got my kids to bed. I will also be giving up a lot of my bank holiday to resolving any issues reported...
Much appreciated Stooz.
Polite suggestion...there are a few IT techies here on the site who I am sure would be more than willing to donate some of their time to free advice or planning of future upgrades or tweaks. Obviously they would need to be au fait with the specifics of the setup which has privacy and potential security issues from your perspective - so I understand if you are reticent there.
Part of the issue historically has been reactive responses rather than having a plan of attack going in.
Obviously hindsight is a wonderful thing but when you announced the improvements around the website security my first thoughts were 'uh oh this could get messy', as it was clearly going to be a learn as you go along exercise into something that is never straightforward (networking...).
It could be as simple as having a compilation tick box list of potential 'gotchas' for things like firewall rules et al so that the basic start point is 95% there and any subsequent tweaks would be icing on the cake rather than fundamental make or break.
FWIW this is how networking consultants would ideally proceed, plan it out based on previous experiences, physically test it out first before going 'live' into a production environment.
Even the biggest players get it wrong sometimes, Microsoft managed to mess up their SPF file recently, deleting an entire SMTP include IP range without adding it back in to a later part of the file - cue loads of businesses getting non delivery or spam foldered sent email...