[AusNOG] Telstra Business - known issues??

[Ross Wheeler]

Sorry for the noise on a saturday - I'm attempting to help a friend sort 
out a problem. He's overseas and only has sporadic comms.

Tuesday morning (Apr 23) his office stopped receiving email.
They have a telstra nbn broadband service, and telstra provided modem.
They run a small unix box with postfix for their mail.
For years, this has worked fine. Modem forwards port 25 to internal mail 
server.

While we have a very temporary work-around in place, he's trying to get 
the problem fixed. Attempting to connect to the external IP results in 
nothing - not even a SYN packet - arriving at the mail server, yet mail 
goes out fine.

I've checked the IP address, and there hasn't been any change there, it's 
still their correct (static) IP.

I've changed the internal address the port forwards to, and still no 
evidence of any incoming traffic. I've tried other ports, including high 
numbered (non-priviliged) ports, same thing.

It appears that either the modem has stopped forwarding anything from the 
outside, OR telstra are not permitting any incoming connections.

It's not my service, I don't have the details (or authority) to talk to 
tesltra on his behalf, and his time difference and minimal connectivity 
make it difficult for him to either.

My question is: is anyone aware of any current outages with telstra that 
might cause this, or any "changes in policy" that we might be unaware of 
where they've said (for example) "unless you pay the incoming service 
feature tax, we're blocking all incoming packets"??

Thanks in advance,
RossW