Mail delivery/DNS oops

[unixronin]

Mail delivery to caerllewys.net has not been working for several days because smtp.caerllewys.net was not resolving.  This turns out to be because my nameserver was not loading the external zones, and this in turn is because I tried to add @ IN records for babcom.com, babcom.info and caerllewys.net, having temporarily forgotten that BIND9 will not allow an @ IN record to be a CNAME.

If you've been trying to snd mail to *@caerllewys.net and it's been bouncing, this is why.  It's fixed now, but the DNS information may take a little while to propagate again.  This time, I've annotated the zone files to remind myself of this the next time someone asks me why babylon5.babcom.com and smtp.caerllewys.net (for example) resolve, but babcom.com and caerllewys.net don't.

Bad unixronin.  No donut.  Fifty geek points will be taken away.

Comments

Geek Points

[adriang.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, folks like you and me have lots of geek points to spare. 8-)

Adrian

Re: Geek Points

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I frequently feel like most of my geek points have trickled out through an unmended hole in my pocket.

Re: Geek Points

[adriang.livejournal.com]

I think it's mostly because of the changing assumptions about what geekiness means, over time. I remember looking over some questions on a test someone made up to measure geekiness. One of the questions asked when I had first gotten access to the internet. Clearly the author thought the earlier I had access, the better, but what the author asked was at what stage in my life I first had access. One of the stages was high school, but when I was in high school, the internet was largely limited to a few institutions involved in defense research. It wasn't until I was in college and NSFNet was introduced that I had any possibility of getting internet access.

So many people's ideas of geekiness or nerdliness are biased towards things which are relevant to the last 5 or 10 years, to the exclusion of any understanding that prior years ever happened. Geekiness no longer seems to include experiences like writing floating point emulation code for an embedded processor so that the code and the data take less than 256 bytes of memory. These days, to prove my geekiness, I need to be an expert on ASP.NET. No thanks.

I'm afraid that part of the problem is, we're just getting old. The geek point we have in our pocket just don't seem to count in the minds of youngsters, these days.

Adrian

Re: Geek Points

[hmstryx.livejournal.com]

I remember when these used to equate to a salary. Those were the days. At least you didn't pull a geek faux pa and criticize the talent of the zone file as 'illegible' because it was sent/recieved in binary using a client that ignored carriage returns. I actually had one (self-proclaimed) unix guru do that, ignorant of what ASCII-Binary transfers did in Windows-*nix environments. He went on to work for Allegiance Telecom and a string of ISPs in Dallas as lead tech, all the while deriding other admins to better his career and ego. Its a wonder I didn't sue him myself, though I did get him fired more than once.

Ppl like that scare me. That's why I put my faith in gun oil, goon squads, and let the dress code go when shopping for IT pros. Just ask Databeast. I've had more luck finding talent in a nightclub than through conventional 'agencies' and B2B services. One energy trader I knew insisted on hiring only punk-rockers (old-school 1970s). True to their word, the policy kept them honest and upfront. They were doing well until a straight edge satellite client 'omitted' a nuclear reactor from their asset report, leading to a massive oversight at the HQ. Oops! Still they can't blame the programmers involved - no informaiton.

Still, the blame game is tearing our industry apart and every year more paper-thin (ref rice paper in Kung Fu) certification-dogs enter the force. It wears down our wage-scale and makes offers like the Sun job possible, even plausible, because -someone- will do it if not you.

The geek-point is pretty much like Atlantian Lore - meaningless unless you were actually there or in a real fight (and the whole point of business management is to avoid a *real* fight). The funny thing is, they think we are all dead and gone - especially the historians who remember who ACTUALLY invented the Internet (Dr. 'Lick' at DARPA, with his papers on Galactic Networking). Newspeak. NewHistory. Very Babylon 5-esque. Complete with consequences (cites Nuclear paper in your blog).

Look me up. Old guard should stick together.

Re: Geek Points

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think you're right on the mark there. Knowledge and understanding have been abandoned in favor of buzzwords, cookie-cutter certifications that start out by teaching to the test, and point-and-drool interfaces. I can't match adriang's claim of writing floating-point emulation in 254 bytes .... but I remember a custom processor I worked on once that packed strings to save memory (both memory and speed were limited, this was 1979), and the first thing the company had me do was write a string packing/unpacking routine for it which, unbeknownst to me, was then to be compared to theirs to see how good I was.
Well, my code occupied one byte more memory than their "standard" ..... but it also ran seven machine cycles faster. Per character.

I look at the current rush to offshore everything that can possibly be offshored, and I fear for our industry. These MBA imbeciles haven't figured out yet that they're locating people who can produce their product overseas for a tenth of the cost that they can, then they're training them to do it and handing over all their proprietary information. American business is patting itself on the back about how much money it's saving, while exporting their entire businesses to nations that are graduating two orders of magnitude more Ph.Ds every year than the US. This strikes me as a recipe for disaster.

I think it's gotten to the point where the primary consideration when picking a career is, "Can this job be offshored?" If we're not careful, a few more cycles of this and there'll be no US lobs left outside of law, medicine, and retail and service industries.

Re: Geek Points

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Very Babylon 5-esque

Funny you should mention that as we are http://www.babcom.com:81 (bah Verizon for blocking port 80!)

Re: Geek Points

[hmstryx.livejournal.com]

I was actually a fan interested in the IP struggle for B5 (the series). My dinner reservation to discuss the possibility of licensing and continuation for the series or an alternative title that JMS would be interested in was cut short in 2001 by a little domestic disturbance. My spouse threw a knife at me for letting a girl sleep at my loft (seperate bedroom) rather than let her drive herself home extremely drunk from the club (2 blocks away). I only met her because I had already had my kids taken 'to punish me' the prior day and I walked the 1 block to the club looking for regular (guy) friends to console me.

Despite sleeping on the floor (concrete) at my girl's feet all night after she decided to cut her little kidnapping caper short, as well as her presence in the loft the whole night, she was still livid over the whole idea another woman had come into -her- home ($2K/m rent, mine). After a terse attempt at being civil all morning, she spun around and 'slipped' - tossing a blade about 15 feet to land at my feet by the door. Both my guest and I decided we weren't going to stay after that, and split to get lunch down the street while she cooled off. I hadn't taken two steps outside the door before my spouse locked it behind me (see abuse: lockouts, women as abusers).

I was a little upset after the unprovoked attack and left with my guest after being locked out of my house - seperated from my 2 year old child. Despite about 30 minutes of begging over the phone while driving around Deep Ellum in Dallas, I couldn't convince my spouse to just drop it and to attend the JMS dinner event (which I had pre-purchased seats for) that night. I eventually skipped out myself in disgust and exhaustion - which I've come to deeply regret. I figured I'd just send JMS some money and do the date later after the $2M Aug '01 IPO, but a subsequent (and lasting) parental kidnapping that day (Aug 18th 2001) curtailed that plan and led to a greek tragedy of corporate sabotage, extortion, and fraud over the next four years aimed at torpedoing the entire Project (http://www.beyondwar.com/). Despite Federal Law (28 U.S.C. Sec 1738A Paragraph E) - no criminal prosecution has been undertaken for the 4 years I haven't seen my son or the $10,000+ in ransom paid supporting this. It's complicated, but the written death threats, armed carjacking - hostage taking - and identity document robbery, 9mm barrel scar in my face, missing lug nuts on my car (recoverd Dec 02), and extortion letters to employees would normally evoke just a little attention from the Mrs. Fletcher types out there. U.S. Law Enforcement: Zero.

Current premise defending the U.S. law enforcement agencies: A Parent has no right to their children (biological or by relationship) unless a court so orders. Actions prior that order are non-criminal, as are any criminal actions that might involve custody issues with a biological parent not-conflicting with a prior (legal or illegal) order.

Since that time revenue has dropped about $500,000 since the defamation campaign, which even brought ICANN in to reclaim a domain used by the non-biological abductor to commit identity theft. The fundring round alone was worth about $2M, which I believe based on letters the abducting party wanted a piece of - free and clear - for access (not return) of the children (81 days and 2 years old, respectively). We've also seen a $1600 identity theft scam run from the same City the abductors moved to against my current spouse, most likely related to the armed robbery of our papers Nov '02 about 3 weeks after the public written solicitation for murder.

Needless to say, my career took a hit as well as every bank working with me - and reflexively every background check that civilian employers (illegally) require for the few remaining jobs in the U.S. When 9/11 came I didn't even raise an eyebrow, other than to ask my caller about a minute after plane 1 hit, "Where's plane two?" - and then to watch it enter frame on live TV. (Old alert, Defcon mailing list - src FBI Manilla: detailing 2 plane scenario). As of today, I doubt my little boy (taken at 81 days of age) even knows who his real father is.

"What a country!?!" - Yakov Smirnov