The MacDeskBlog

I’ve been planning to migrate mail to a new server. The current server must have caught wind of it because it decided this morning to disable the announcement mailing lists. Rather than troubleshoot the problem, I am working on migrating mail. I hope to have announcements working again within the next few days.

[Update] The mail server decided that announcements are okay again. I’m still working on the transition to a new mail server, but the urgency is reduced. I hope to avoid any mail server or announcement outages during this process. [/Update]

[Update 2] It appears that I gummed up my mail server for a couple of days. Some of you probably received multiple daily updates or updates for Thursday or Friday this morning. I’m finished with the groundwork for this transition, but the cutover is still to come. [/Update 2]

I’ve received several reports that site preferences stopped working recently. I haven’t had time to investigate yet, but hope to do so soon. I apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.

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

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.

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.

Netflix: Requests and Suggestions

Hey,

My wife and I share a queue and we frequently have problems where we’ll get three of my movies at home and none of hers. It can really gum up our queue. Sometimes, I have to send one or more of the movies back and put it BACK INTO OUR QUEUE for another chance to watch it. Other times, when we’re trying to catch up on TV series, we’ll end up receiving the discs out of order (blame the USPS) when we’d really rather have our next movie arrive in lieu of having two discs from the TV show at the same time.

It would be really great if you provided a way for us to have separate queues. That way, we’d always be assured of having something to watch when one of us is out of town, and we’d never get frustrated by looking at Disc 4 when Disc 3 is still en route.

Oh, and related to this, when you combine my love of serious anime like Akira and Princess Mononoke with my wife’s love of Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell comedies, you end up making horrible movie recommendations which neither of us like, such as Pokemon and Paddington Bear. I really think you’d give us better recommendations if you tracked us separately.

I’m really hope that you implement this. It would eliminate all of the frustrations which we currently have with Netflix and keep us from switching to Amazon Unbox, Comcast PPV, or iTunes movie store.

Thanks for your consideration,

Ryan

By request, I upgraded Television, and University and College Campuses from searchable keywords to categories. Of course, the real intent of the request was for more submissions in those categories, as well as more Family Guy, more Cars/Autos, more Logos, more Music, more Humor, and more Multiple Monitor Sets.

I will be upgrading WordPress for http://macdesktops.com/weblog before next week. Previous upgrades have gone smoothly with just some brief cosmetic changes during the upgrade. If anything goes wrong, I’ll rollback and try again later.