Current Brainstorms
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Making Changes
I'm playing with some of the newer stuff in Blogger. Forgive me if not everything works as well. I'm also changing the comments to add a little more aninomity to the comment posting. Basically I'm trying to remove the emails so people don't get spammed if they comment on my site with their email address.
1:35 PM Posted by Big Dave
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The DNS Must Die
The
DNS Must Die... That's all there is to it.
I learn more about the upkeep of our servers by chasing some of the little things that I could ever learn just reading a book on the subject. Over the last few weeks I've been chasing a mail problem where we couldn't email outside the company to Yahoo or AOL users. We thought it was one of several things.
First I tried adding a
reverse DNS lookup to our external DNS servers. This allows a server to take an IP address and confirm that the sender is legitimate. It's not error proof, but it does cut down on the spam. After calls to our ISP for the office and for our production co-located facility, I managed to get them to point to our DNS servers. Once there I had to figure out how to set up a reverse DNS zone on the Linux servers that serve as our external DNS servers. All of that work took me about a week of research and trial and error. Oh... And it failed to fix the problem.
Next I got on the mail server and tried to run "nslookup -querytype=mx yahoo.com" Nothing... Well with that I had my next lead. I knew that the DNS wasn't returning the IP addresses for Yahoo's mail servers to I went to the internal DNS and added forwarders so that when it didn't know how to handle a request it would at least go ask for help before throwing up it's hands (figuratively speaking) and saying I don't know how to handle your request.
That fixed my Yahoo and AOL problems, but we still had one host that wasn't responding. We managed to get it working, but the problem came back 30 minutes later. I hate Microsoft's DNS server. I'm quickly becoming a Linux fan when it comes to network architecture. Linux is much more complicated to set up, but once it's configured properly it's no where near as likely to fail. All that to say that I think that our internal DNS server should die a slow and painful death. A curse on both it's houses. It's working now, and I'm not going to mess with it, but who knows when it could decide to quit working again. Grr....
But you know what... I learned a whole lot. I guess that really should count for something. But I'm still going to cast evil glances and that stupid server every time I walk past it.
10:22 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Gabbing
I saw
this article on the hilarity of making Star Wars and thought it would be fun for anyone who likes the movies.
Josh and I went to see "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" last night. We agreed that the only thing they did well was the marketing. The movie was absolutely horrible. I wanted to see it because of the
technology that went into making the film, but it was bad. I can't express how bad this movie was. And this coming from a person who thought
Bubba Hotep was halarious. I walked out of the theatre really angry. I haven't seen a movie in months and I pick this. Basically I'm telling everyone to avoid it at all costs. Don't go see it. Don't rent it. Don't waste your time if it's on TV.
9:48 AM Posted by Big Dave
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Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Hardly Working
I've been working so hard this last week that it almost seems I haven't seen anyone else all week. I spend all day working away and have hardly seen or talked to my co-workers. And this is just the beginning of our busy season.
2:58 PM Posted by Big Dave
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Monday, September 06, 2004
So what now?
I feel like I should be doing something with myself. I just haven't figured out what that should be. So far today I've played XBox, watched a
couple of
movies, read a
book, and surfed the web for wedding photographers. What else do I do with myself?
Hmm... this is an
idea.
9:10 PM Posted by Big Dave
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