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by: Bernard Teo








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Bernard Teo
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List of Categories : Database * Technology * Commentary * Singapore * Travel *

Fri 14 Nov 2003

Airport Extreme and IMAPS and POPS

Category : Commentary/IMAPSPOPS.txt

I've discovered that the Airport Extreme Base Station does not pass ports 993 (for IMAP over SSL) and 995 (for POP over SSL) through even though I've set port mapping on.

I've noticed this before when I got POPS and IMAPS working on a home machine that had the old Airport Base Station, but not at the office where we have an Airport Extreme.

But, then again, it be could be due to the different networks I am on - one on PacNet and one on SingNet. But I don't think so. It's probably the base station. I need to do a test again tonight to prove this conclusively.

Which brings me to the point of this whole weblog. Even when you try to make everything work smoothly (a click here and a click there), you're still going to get hit by blocks like these. A lot of the opposition to the Mac from the IS perspective comes from the belief that the Mac would eliminate IS department headcount. How do you spend your days when you're not going to be busy troubleshooting system failures?

My point is that there is a whole lot of stuff we can spend our time better on - like how do you organise the business workflows, how do you account for things so that you know if you're making money or not? All these use IT but you're working on things at a higher level. The whole point of driving your way quickly past all the low-level SMTP, sudo, /etc/xinetd stuff is to get to this top-level view fast - before the business gets eaten away by the competition.

In case this is overstating things, we need to remember that a programmer or graphics artist in China (or India) is happy making S$400 a month (that's like $250-plus in US dollars). That's why a friend of mine can do a pretty nice business bringing work out to China. You can be sloppy sizing a project, and let it overshoot by three months and still make money. It's a tremdendous cost difference. That's why we want things to just work. That's why we use the Mac. It's not because we love Apple. It's because there's no way out but to compete - but we've got to choose our tools well.

Posted at 3:59AM UTC | permalink

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