/dev/zero

Tip #1 - When registering a new domain name, don’t forget to tell your DNS administrator so he can actually add the domain to the DNS servers, mail servers, web servers, etc.
Tip #2 - When registering a new domain name, be very careful what you type when entering your DNS server information. Typos can have disasterous affects, and not just on the domain you’re registering.
Tip #3 - Be careful not to allow things to fall into your toaster. Toasters get hot. Many things burn when they get hot. Smoke coming out of a toaster is a Bad Thing ™

1 & 2 - 3 days ago one of our customers called us asking why his domain was suddenly offline. When he tried to pull up his web page he kept getting an old version, he coulnd’t get his email and he couldn’t log into the FTP server to upload updates to his web site.
Turned out his domain was suddenly pointing to the old server. So was mail and ftp. All of these are set up as CNAMEs for our new server. When I checked DNS it showed the server hostname pointing to the correct IP address, but anyone outside our network was getting the IP address of the old server. I was going nuts trying to figure out why. The admin at our ISP tried restarting their DNS servers. When they’d restart, it would show the correct IP address for the new server, then 2 minutes later it would return the IP address of the old server again. He started packet sniffing and saw that the bad report was coming from one of the root servers. This was just getting more and more bizarre. Why the hell is that hostname even IN the root servers? It’s never been a DNS server. The root servers should only be returning IP addresses for DNS servers. Anything else it should just give the hostname of the appropriate name server.
Eventually I found the problem: had registered a new domain name with GANDI. When she had entered the name servers for the new domain, she accidently typed the hostname for the mail/web server instead of the DNS server, but typed the correct IP address. This created a new name server record in the root servers, with the IP address of the old server, but the hostname of the new one. Took me 3 days to find this. I will throttle her quite thoroughly when she wakes up.

3 - I went to toast an English muffin this morning. Oddly smoke started pouring out of the toaster. I turned it off and peered inside. I got a whiff of sage while doing this, and spoted a leaf inside the toaster. It was burning quite nicely. Could have been worse. At least it didn’t catch fire.

Last night I finally got to join the Santa Carla By Night Vampire LARP. We played for 4 hours, but I only got to play for about 5 minutes. My character doesn’t know anyone yet and has not yet been given permission to enter the city. He was able to make contact with the Seneschal, who handed him off to his retainer. The retainer met with him, then told him to lie low and hopefully he could be introduced to the prince in a little bit. That was the full extent of my character’s play for the night. The seneschal and his retianer then promptly forgot all about him and the prince and seneschal were busy for the rest of the night dealing with a primogen meeting. Such an exciting first night of play. <sigh>

You people are talkative. I missed, what, a week, reading my journal?
240 posts. And the better part of 5 hours to get through it. Ok, so there was break of about an hour while I got distracted by Vera (sadly, a font, not a woman. Sigh.)
Just goes to show you people have more lives than me. Er, you know what I mean.

Did I mention the people in the financial aid office at Cabrillo really suck?
No?
The people in the financial aid office at Cabrillo really suck.
I’ve been struggling to get financial aid since mid Feb. I turned in both FAFSAs (02/03 and 03/04) on time, got a response back from the DofEd within 48 hours and Cabrillo told me “It’ll be 3 weeks before we get that info.” Then they had it 24 hours later.
Then they wanted me to make an appointment with my advisor. But they didn’t tell me that. I had to go in and bug them and have them check my file, whence they told me there was a note for me to make an appointment. So I did. And I met with my advisor.
All she had to say was “I don’t understand this information on this form. Do it over.”
So I did, and gave it back.
3 weeks later I get a letter saying I got a Pell grant.
Then I got emails from the DofEd saying my revised SARs are ready. Cool beans.
I went to the Cabrillo FA office today to find out what comes next.

FA Drone: Can I help you?
Me: Yes, I’m here to find out the status of my financial aid.
FA Drone: When did you apply? (Note: this is always their first question, EVERY time I go in there. It’s always someone different behind the counter, but the complete lack of any sign of life or ambition to DO anything is the same.)
Me: Mid Feb.
FA Drone: You should get a letter…
Me: Already got it.
FA Drone: What’s your SSN? (types it into her computer) You got a Pell grant. (said as if that was the difnitive answer to any questions I might have.)
Me: I know.
FA Drone: It should have had an amount on your letter.
Me: Yes, it did.
FA Drone: (checking calendar) You should get a check first week of May.
Me: Ok. What about other options. Student loans? Other grants?
FA Drone: (blank stare.)
FA Drone:(Finally realizing I actually meant it.) Student loans? It’s much too late to apply for student loans. Not for this semester. Maybe for fall semester…
Me: Excuse me?
FA Drone: The semester has already started. The deadline was March 2 (I was about to interrupt to point out I had my paperwork in on time) 2001.
Me: Excuse me?!?
FA Drone: The deadline is passed. You can’t get any loans until Fall semester.
Me: Is Barb (my advisor) in?
FA Drone: (blank stare)
FA Drone: (realizing that, yet again, I actually meant it) Yes, but she’s not available for walk-ins. Would you like to make an appointment?
Me: (finally realizing the full extent to which this beauracracy will go to deliberatly inconvenience you) Yes.
FA Drone: (pencils me in for 3:00 on Friday) What do you want to see her about?
Me: (feeling that that should be PRETTY FUCKING OBVIOUS GIVEN THE CONVERSATION WE JUST HAD) Getting money.
FA Drone: (surprisingly actually accepting that at face value this time, finishes penceling me in.)

I mean Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick! Even the IRS isn’t this bad!
“Too late for student loans” my ASS! It’s been 2 months of this shit! had a disbursment from his LOANS in 9 days!
I wonder if the FA office at UCSC can process my paperwork for me. At least they seem motivated…

This doesn’t even include the part where she explained how loans aren’t free money, that I have to pay it back (well DUH, that’s why it’s called a LOAN) leaning over the counter using the tone of voice one uses to address an erring child.

It feels good when you get something working right.
Before Easter break we covered DHCP and DNS in CIS192. I’m already a DNS expert and fairly familiar with DHCP, so it wasn’t all that new to me.
However I’d noticed for some time in my DNS logs here on the home networks that all the WinXP machines would try to submit DNS updates whenever they would boot. I’d heard about dynamic DNS before but never implemented it.
While doing my homework for lab5a (DHCP) I came across the docs for how to set up the DHCP server to talk to the DNS server to do these updates.
Now I’ve turned off the DHCP server built into the router (it’s very basic. Limits you to a pool of 10 IP addresses and has the hostnames hard-coded (dhcppcXX where XX is the last octet of the assigned IP address.) and set up the (much more capable) DHCP server on my Linux server.
Now all my clients are properly updating DNS when they configure their interfaces.
This also made for an interesting study in configuring Linux (Red Hat to do this. XP tries to submit an update by default. Red Hat does not. It just gets the IP address and goes on it’s merry way, not bothering with DNS updates. Took a bit of parsing through the upteen million scripts Linux uses to start up it’s network interfaces to find the right config file (which, surprise! doesn’t exist by default) to put the right string to get it to submit it’s hostname to the DNS server (or more properly, to the DHCP server which then submits it to the DNS server).
Did any of that make sense?
Probably not. And given that I’m admining a network of 7 machines, all on RFC1918 IP space (private, non-routable addresses) it actually doesn’t mean that much.
But it’s useful to know when/if I ever have to admin a large network again. No more having to give people static IP addresses just so they can keep their hostname across boots.

So for whatever reason I haven’t logged into LJ in a few days. I’m way behind. So I haven’t commented on anyone’s journal in a while. It will take me a bit to catch up.
Not that many of you are really expecting me to say much.

I got an income change results notice from the Cabrillo College financial aid office to the affect that I qualify for a $3,150 Pell grant, so hopefully I’ll actually have some money in the bank soon. The stupid thing is the “Analyzed Expected Family Contribution” is $829. Uhm, hello? I’m 32. Just how much do you expect my parents to contribute? It’s not like I’m a dependant any more. We haven’t even lived in the same state for 9 years!

Today I went with to her monthly SOBOA meeting and somehow I got elected secretary. Me, the guy who couldn’t get elected Dog Catcher, and now I’m the secretary of an organization I’m not even a member of. I’m not even bi. I’m just queer-friendly. But the secretary resigned in a huff and since SOBOA is a registered non-profit, they are legally required to have a president, vice president, treasurer and secratary. Oh well, all I have to do is show up at the monthly meeting and take minutes.

and I went to the Santa Carla by Night Vampire game here in Santa Cruz Friday night.
We’d had sushi at Benten on N. Pacific Ave earlier in the night and walked by where the game was just getting started for the night, so he picked up his character booklet just in case he joined in this wee, then we went back to his place to play Civilization: Call To Power. Damn that game is addicting. This time we played cooperatively. The Scots started taking his cities and I had just enough gold and advances to hand over to him to hold them at bay.
Anyway, around 10:00 he decides he has to get to Game after all as his character has some important plot stuff going on. I decided to hang out and watch, as I’ve never actually observed a Vampire LARP. I’ve always been biased against them based on my experiences with the group I played with 10 years ago. That was table-top, but they still took things way too seriously and I got burned by the experience. When I saw the same people getting into LARP and not being able to separate reality from game, that formed the basis of my opinion of LARPers.
I was pretty intrigued by what was going on. Especially when I’d see players walk up to each other, indicate they were asking for information OOC, and actually get it. Hell, They even know things OOC about each other’s characters that would be damaging if the characters knew, and everyone was cool with it. Much more mature group here. (In the group I played with, everyone guarded their secrets so closely, you couldn’t even hint at talking about something OOC). I decided to give this a whirl, so I spoke to the storyteller and I’ll be creating a character this week. Debating if I want to resurrect my old Tremere (as he’s pretty cool, though I’ll have to water him down a bit to fit this game.) or create something new (but probably also a Tremere). After the end of gaming for the night I was yakking with the “prince” and kept getting the oddest feeling I was talking to and just not recognizing her. She was sitting in shadow and her voice was similar. It was weird. I was pretty sure it wasn’t her, but it felt weird. She had given me a smile and a wave when she walked past earlier, like she knew me, and it’s been a while since I laid eyes on Laura.
Anyway, Martin and I went back to his place to play some more CivCTP and finally called it quits at about 04:30. I crashed on the futon and woke up to him beating eggs in the morning. Breakfast, swing by my place so I could drop off my laptop and get a change of clothes, then we went “Spatzieren”. We found a nice little natural history museum down just off Seabright beach, with a tide pool and everything. Then driving around some of the neighborhoods just off the beaches on the south end of town, just to see what was there. Then up Bay Street to Old San Jose Road. I’d recently read about how this is an alternate way over the hill into San Jose, so we followed it all the way. Sure enough there were signs for Los Gatos, so we took it to the other end, which met up with 17 just past the summit. Must remember that in the future. Could save time when there’s an accident on 17. Now I know what that overpass on 17 is, just before you get to the summit on 17 southbound.
We ended up in Los Gatos. Martin wanted to check out The Cats. I warned him it was pricey, but we looked anyway. Sure enough, too rich for his budget (bless him for feeding me lately. Must go pester the financial aid people at Cabrillo more. I’m tired of being broke.) So we explored Los Gatos more and found a Hawaiian place with decent prices. Oh GOD the food was good. Some sort of pork wrapped in (banana?) leaf, with a little bit of salmon. It was yummy.
The return trip was over 9, just so we could say we made the full circle. Got back to The Asylum just in time for me to read to the girls. We’re reading The Princess Bride. It’s even funnier than the movie, and that’s one of my favorite movies. Tonight was the chapter about Inigo, with the sword fight at the top of the cliffs. They dialog in the movie really stuck quite close to the book; I’m impressed.
When I finished that and walked back into the living room, Martin was stretched out on the couch. I remarked something about “nothing like reading the sword fight scene from The Princess Bride to the girls” and he said “Why do you think I’m lying here, in stead of sitting in front of one of the computers”? Heh, he’d been listening to me read. He called it a night at that point and headed home. I went to my room and played some CivCTP, but it was a boring game. Went to bed, got up at almost 3 today (damn this time change!).

Well Soba, anyway.
She refuses to use kitty litter. She will pee on anything before using a litter box filled with kitty litter. So I give her one with news papers instead. She is quite happy with that. But she will spend 20 minutes scratching at the paper trying to cover her deposit every time she uses the box!
Silly cat. If you want to cover it so bad, use the other box, with the litter in it.

I spent most of today getting caught up with work. I’m enemployed, but I still have work to do. Such is the life of a sys admin when he’s doing web hosting. Too bad 90% of our customers don’t pay…
has been coming up with a bunch of domain ideas lately. His plan is to come up with 20 or 30 domains over the next couple of weeks that he hopes will make $100 or so / month each. And I have to set them all up for him, then has to actually design them.
I spent most of today setting up DNS for all of them, then setting up the hosting space and the email servers. And while I was at it, fixing little things that were broken, cleaning up stuff. I had copied all domain files from the old server to the new server, but not all the domains had actually been migrated, so I went and cleaned out those that don’t reside on the new server. It was getting confusing remembering which serever was hosting which domains.
I need to come up with a CGI script so Thomas can just go to a web page on the in-house server, fill in a domain, and it will log into the DNS, mail and web servers and set them up without me having to touch anything.

I’m starting to fall behind in school. I left my homework for both my classes to the last minute, so they didn’t get done in time. And I got a 90% on my last quiz. I need to finish both labs that are already due, then do the two labs for this week this weekend. Luckily it’s all easy stuff. One of them will require actually going to the school computer lab though, since it requires equipment I don’t have here at home (a null modem cable, of all things).

I really need to find a job soon. Thomas was bugging me about money again today. The financial aid people at school are somewhat less than helpful. I gave them some paperwork they requested, only to have them give it back to me saying they didn’t understand my answers. What’s not to understand? I was unemployed. Therefor I made $0. That’s what I put on the form. I did my taxes and claimed an earned income credit, so I put that on the form. She couldn’t understand how I could have an earned income credit if I didn’t file a tax return. Obviously I filed a return, idiot!

People have gotten all bent out of shape on the Userfriendly fan list. A new user came on and started PGP signing his mail. I asked him politely to not do that when mailing this list. He did so again, and another user asked him to please trim his responses, as he had embedded a one line reply in the middle of a lot of quoting. I replied to that again asking the newbie to not PGP sign mail. All hell broke loose after that. A bunch of people who have been on the list forever and a day and know the rules jumped up and down demanding to know why this wasn’t allowed. Even the more technical people who understand how email and PGP worked didn’t get it. One even started calling it “dictatorial rules carried out by the admins” and pointing out that he had helped fund the renewel of the domain name registration and he was going to sign off if we didn’t “back down”. I came very close to invoking Godwin’s law on him and warning him to not let the door hit him on the butt on his way out. Luckily it seems to have blown over now.

apparently won an auction for a replacement screen for my laptop, and he says he has an external battery that should connect to the AC port, so maybe I’ll have a useful machine again soon. Now if I could just get a replacement keyboard…