The MacDeskBlog

MacDesktops is up once again after a very strange DNS outage.

<GeekStuff>Yesterday, I installed four innocuous looking updates on my mail/DNS server using Software Update: Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4 (v1.0), Airport Utility Software Update 2009-002 (v5.42), Safari (v4.0.1), and iLife Support (v9.0.3). The installs required a server restart. No big deal. When the server came back up, everything seemed to be fine. But this morning, my wife’s iPhone wouldn’t fetch mail. By the time I got to work, my iPhone wouldn’t either. When I finished up work, I finally got a chance to determine the scope of the problem, at which point I saw that Server Admin showed that DNS was running (green light and “DNS Service is: Running” message) but also said “Start Time: Not Started”. Very suspicious. Checking the log revealed that DNS shutdown at 13:27 yesterday after a series of zone transfer denials. I rebooted the server and headed home for a closer look. Running named in the foreground told me “/etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple:80: zone ‘0.0.127.in-addr.arpa’: already exists previous definition: /etc/dns/publicView.conf.apple:63″. Huh? I didn’t catch that immediately, but 3 minutes later when I tried again, it sunk in. So, I popped open publicView.conf.apple, ignored the “// PLEASE DO NOT MANUALLY MODIFY THIS FILE!” warning. And found the definitions for zone “0.0.127.in-addr.arpa.”. Sure enough, there were two of them. Not knowing which one to comment out, I picked the first one, saved the changes, and tried to launch named. It worked. I then looked up the error message about zone transfer denials, and figured that “Allows zone transfers” should be enabled (I suspect that I broke that a few months ago when I upgraded from 10.4 Server to 10.5 Server).</GeekStuff>

I have no idea which of the four updates messed up my publicView.conf.apple file. But the problem is fixed now and DNS has propagated to the secondary DNS.

Sorry about the unplanned outage over the weekend. Dreamhost decided that macdesktops.com was using too many resources to remain on a shared server. Rather that contact me and work with me to resolve the issue, they just disabled the main page and sent me an email. Fortunately, they were able to migrate everything to a virtual private server today, with minimal changes required on my end. My costs will go up modestly, but I’m still an order of magnitude below the costs when I had my own hardware co-located. I’ll need to keep an eye on performance and resource utilization over the next week to know what the ultimate bill will end up being.

My apologies for the unexpected downtime.

Ryan

Hey folks. Sorry for the delay on today’s second picture. As I was filling in the gap last night, I found that my mail/etc server at home was having some trouble. As I spent several hours fixing it, I didn’t pay enough attention to my posting and put the snakes up on the wrong day. The server is now working much better, and I fixed the posting date for the snakes. The biggest impact was that the announcements went out several hours late, and I had to send them twice to capture the late posting.

By the way, the submission queue is very short these days. If you would like to share any of your artwork, photographs, humor, or whatnot, please send them in.

My prediction for the Electoral College

This is my prediction for the outcome of tomorrow’s election. My basic assumption is that Obama will sweep every state where the polls show him within 4%. A week and a half ago, I thought he’d take West Virginia, but that seems to have returned to and solidified for McCain. On the other hand, a week and a half ago, I wouldn’t have guessed that Georgia, North Dakota, Montana and Arizona would be in play.

McCain supporters certainly have the ability to prove the folly of my assumption by getting out there and voting. Similarly, Obama supporters also have that ability by staying home.

So, do you civic duty. Go Vote. And, perhaps more importantly, Stay The Frack In Line even it takes all day and the official closing time passes you by. If you get into line before the polls close, you WILL be allowed to vote.

What’s your prediction?

I’m not accustomed to just posting links, but this article speaks for itself and I hope a couple hundred million Americans read it before November.

The Politics of Lying

One of the unavoidable downsides of working as a political speechwriter is meeting some smart aleck who says, “so you write all those lies that politicians say.” Between clenched teeth, my usual response is: “I’ve never written a lie in my life.” It’s true: not only for reasons of personal morality, but because no politician I’ve ever met wants to be caught telling a lie.

Sure politicians occasionally stretch the truth or exaggerate, but willful and conscious lying is something else, which makes the stream of fabrications from the [ed.: read the article] campaign over the last week that much more shocking.

It boggles my mind that anyone actually believes a word that comes out of McCain or Palin’s mouth at this point. McCain was for the environment before he was against it. He was opposed to Jerry Falwell before he prostrated himself at Falwell’s Liberty University. He was one of the troops before he was against them. He was against the Bush tax cuts before he was for them. He was for ‘experience’ before he picked Palin. He was for the wrong war before he was for the wrong war. Oh wait, he didn’t flip-flop on that one, he was just plain wrong.

He doesn’t know how many houses he owns. He doesn’t know anything about economics let alone the economy. He was against government earmarks before he picked the earmark happy governor of the most earmark dependent state to be his VP candidate.

And lo and behold, his flip-floppery is contagious. Now Palin says that she is a crusader against the very earmarks that she championed, such as the Bridge to Nowhere. There are so many negative things to point out about Palin, but really, there’s only one that matters: McCain showed the judgement he would use in the Oval Office. He picked someone who eliminates the one argument he actually made traction with: experience. He picked someone to cynically appeal to conservative Hillary backers and/or to pander to the religious right (who, for some reason, forgive both her inability to make abstinence-only education work with her own children and her willingness to let her pregnant teenage daughter make her own decision about continuing her pregnancy). McCain’s experience led him to pick the governor for the past 21 months of the 47th largest state and former mayor of a town of 7000 to be first in line behind McCain who is three years older than the oldest President of the United States.

I just don’t get it. How can anybody support McCain? Sure, he was a “Maverick” before the Rove smear campaign beat him to a bloody pulp in 2000 (btw, I liked him pre-2001). But McCain has remade himself into a pro-Oil, pro-rich, pro-life, pro-war, anti-environment, anti-choice, anti-middle class W-clone in the eight years since then.

I just don’t get it.

Thanks to M. Breez for pointing out a bug in the site. The main page and using the “images from previous week” links should now display seven days of images every time. It was limited to the most recent 14 images which trimmed off an image for 15 picture weeks and displayed less than half of the images for those crazy 30 image weeks back in 2000 (April 5th if that relative link doesn’t jump you back far enough). And if you’re browsing back really far through the archives, you shouldn’t ever receive the same results for previous week searches. You may wonder how that could have happened, so I’ll tell you. If the “images from previous week” search finds no pictures, it checks the prior week for up to 28 days in total. The link was only changing by 7 days even if the search went back 14, 21 or 28 days. So, you could get the same results up to four consecutive times. Now, if the search goes back 28 days, the link will go back 28 days too.

Please let me know if think you find a new bug in this.

Ryan

This morning’s announcement missed one of today’s pictures. I suspect the database backup may have been running at the time, but I’m not certain. The unannounced picture has been up all day. I re-ran the announcements after I got home from work.

DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Planned network outage July 11

On July 11, 2008 starting at 10pm we will have a brief network outage to restructure our routing tables. We are planning two hours to deal with any quirks that may come up, however our Cisco network engineer estimates the total downtime to be under 30 minutes.