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

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.