Parents got a letter today from Insight cable company....i've been caught with my server with these ports open

Port 80 (WWW)
port 25 (SMTP--email stuff)
port 21 (FTP)

intresting they didnt find these ports:
ports 22,23,8080,119,993.....

which leads me to believe they only check the standard ports.....

so do you think i could move the WWW port to port 8000 and the FTP port to port 8002 and nix the web?

Write back a letter stating 'so what'. It's your server, you can manage it how you like. Even if their TOS states that you cannot run a website or mail server for public use, you can run one for internal use in your house. If they don't want you serving pages or handling email, they can block those ports at their router.

If you are doing web-serving, just move things to a different port and find someone to host your pages at port 80 with redirects to your server on port 8080, 81, etc. Email can be done in a similar fashion. It's a PITA though.

In general, they only check and block the standard ports as those are the ones that cause the most grief for them. Their usual business model is to block/restrict http/smtp/DNS etc on 'home' accounts and charge more for 'business' accounts that don't have such restrictions.

well I could make http://reactornet.net point to anything....like xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8000
ya dig?