DNS Ickiness

If you can read this, then our DNS issues are largely fixed.

DNS is a clever system, with redundancy built in - designed to withstand major damage to the 'net. Unfortunately, it is also damned fragile to unlucky coincidences!

In this case, two bad things happened at once: New Franklin's firewall stopped responding (after a T1 outage - thanks, more.net!), and Network Solutions for some reason reverted ns4.tsghelp.com to the wrong address. This is bad, because one of ns4 and New Franklin have to respond for most of TSG's hosted services to respond properly! The result: about 20 domains are working sporadically, email isn't moving, and my hair is going grey. Yick.

Long term solution: TSG will be redoing a whole load of DNS. dns1 and dns2 will be in our office, on each of our lines. dns3 will be New Franklin, and dns4 will be over at Tranquility. Unfortunately, this will take 24-72 hours to take effect.

Short term solution: Why is it so hard to get New Franklin interested enough in their own net connection to have them reboot the damned firewall???? As soon as it is back up, everything else will resume.
Mood: frustrated
Music: Angry phone calls

MS Proxy Server

Sometimes, things work perfectly - and in doing so, they appear to have failed totally. Re/max's proxy server is today's example of this: it came under attack from a kiddie in Asia today, and the log files filled up with details of his attempts to get in. Filled up = several hundreds megabytes of data, enough to fill the partition. At this point, MS Proxy Server did what it is supposed to: it failed safe, and decided to deny every piece of data it didn't have an explicit 'approve' filter for (I could still administer it remotely). In failing safe, the SMTP Server, Web Service and Winsock Proxy Service all stopped (cleanly - nice!).

Now, for the end-user, this appears to suck: they can no longer access the Internet. From the point of view of keeping things safe, this is exactly what you want: the hacker gave up and went home, and restoring service was just a matter of moving the logfiles to a different server. Score one for Microsoft!
Mood: geeky
Music: None, I'm at work

UO Last Night

UO is like crack, only it doesn't have the beneficial side effect of weight loss. Still, it is very satisfying - and I guess it helps that it won't kill me!

Leoana is doing well in her quest to become a good miner/blacksmith. Her mining is now 83, and her blacksmithing is in the mid 50s - not bad at all, considering that I'm doing it by hand. Macros are evil, and all who use them shall burn!
Mood: sleepy
Music: Cows With Guns

Power

The whole Crum building just faced a 15 minute power outtage. No fun! One of our UPSes (the Belkin one) couldn't take the strain, and died after 5-6 minutes. It died cleanly, though - and our servers went down gracefully. The other UPS made the full 15, but I shut the servers attached to it down as a precaution anyway. Amazingly enough, everything that should have restarted after the outage did, with two exceptions: authdaemond, part of SqWebmail really doesn't like the rc.d mechanism in FreeBSD, and Apache on Charizard. The latter is pretty odd, but it turns out that Apache is helpless without a good DNS server - and our DNS server hadn't restarted. "apachtctl start" fixed that one just fine.

So all is well on the power front, at least for now. Hopefully, brown outs won't be too common this summer; last year, they hit Re/Max a few times, as the City of Columbia power completely failed to keep up with demand for air conditioning in 100F weather.

Ironically enough, one of our problem children is called "ipowerweb" - apparently, it is bad power day! They run Exim as their mailer, and it is setup really stupidly: when TLS is denied (for whatever reason), it refuses to deliver at all, rather than failing gracefully. This is permissable but stupid (it breaches ALL the mail RFCs that mention TLS) for an individual trying to make a statement about the need to encrypt email at the envelope level. This is really, really stupid for a hosting company given that about 80% of the world doesn't speak TLS - so mail to 80% of clients will not deliver correctly.

To add insult to injury, not only do their servers require TLS - but they require TLS with very specific protocol requirements (failing to fall back when their protocol of choice is refused), and simply timing out the connection if any sort of DNS mismatch appears. Stupid!
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Ugh, morning

This morning wasn't bad, it just existed. Simply by existing, it was in the way! Roll out of bed, notice that Kris is still comatose, check email, get dressed, count coins, run to meeting. Sit in meeting, talk to Gary, Steve & Roxane. Find out that I have a 2pm meeting with Re/max. Ugh... long day, nothing billable! On the upside, it looks like TSG will be adopting a TSG-wide instant messenger to try and improve communication. Jabber looks like fun!
Mood: blah
Music: None

Mining

Leona, my UO blacksmith/miner on Chesepeake continues to develop nicely. Tonight, I managed to get her mining up to 82, and her blacksmithing up to the low 50s. The only annoying thing is that with such a high mining score, she's starting to get quite a collection of metals she can't even hope to use for quite a while - and they are gathering dust in her bank vault. Still, the blacksmithing guide at Stratics is proving invaluable; between following it (minus the macroing - macros are evil!), and fulfilling Bulk Order Deeds, I'm a happy crafter. :-)
Mood: content
Music: New Model Army: Small Town England

Lawyers and Episcopaleans, Oh My!

I woke up this morning convinced that I was late for an important meeting; threw on clothes, got to the bus station, called in late... and discovered that I had four hours to spare. So I crawled home, cleaned up, and dressed respectably (meeting lawyers requires that!). I quickly posted the West Missouri Episcopalean Diocese website, and went in flustered but at least looking okay. The meeting itself was boring, but at least they said 'yes' to our proposal of 'give us lots of money, and we'll use PostgreSQL+PHP to design you an Intranet'.

Tonight, I will play UO, add more to the site, and hopefully... SLEEP!
Mood: relieved
Music: Train, 4 Non-Blondes

HTML Textboxes

It turns out that AspUp's HTML TextBox really does not like Mozilla at all! So much so that when logged in as admin (and able to see the box), I would have junk all over the place. Oops. So, for now I've disabled it. That's probably for the best anyway - now I won't be tempted to use stupid formatting all the time, since I'll have to remember HTML tags!
Mood: blah
Music: Roar of a Compaq server