EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy, say so, I respect that. Be aware, though, that I am (usually) human and make mistakes.

Good Morning. Another day (nay, another weekend) of DSL adventures behind me. There were moments in the last 48 hours when my portion of the book project was about to end up shattered in the roadway beneath my home office window. That would have been the result of me pitching the entire kit out, in frustration with the nearly complete loss of connectivity. Not total loss, oh no. Just mostly. So that I always had a hope that the latest search I needed to run to confirm a fact would work. So that I always had a hope that DNS would resolve properly, and make the test installations of eDestop run properly. Of course, nearly each time, that hope would dash it's brains out on the rocks at the base of the cliff, making me want to send the computer after, to make sure that the job had been done properly. Frustrating? I guess you could say so.

Hi. How was your weekend? Better than that, I hope and presume. Or perhaps not, if you're following the news, and watching that ever-entertaining nutcase Arafat tell Barak to "... go to Hell!" Ooooh, gee. Thanks for that, bound to help save the lives of countless Palestinian kids, don't you think, Yassir? Maybe you should be standing out there throwing rocks, too, since you seem to think it's such a good idea that you continue to not discourage that... I worry for Moshe, and for everybody, Israeli and Palestinian, in that part of the world. I sure hope that enough of them can step back and see what's happening, and what the possible outcomes are.

I am out of time, gotta head in to the salt mine. Put up a couple of patio farm pix and details of my new status with O'Reilly on Saturday, not that anyone got to see it with the lines in that condition. You have a good day, I'll try to drop back in later. TTFN.

Good Morning. As the politics, rhetoric and fear flow freely in the Middle East, we're here in the middle of silly season. Two weeks till voting time, and it's time to make up your mind, who's lies to believe this time. Should Gore take a dive, and let Bush have the responsibility for mis-handling the Middle East? (As if it could be "handled"!) Israel and the Palestinians remain at each other's throats, and we're tightening up at several locations, against potential threats from bin Laden and his merry crew. Personally, I think that there are enough people in that region of the world that dislike the US that crying "bin Laden" each time something bad happens, like the Cole, is like blaming the Boogie Man. Might be true, but it strikes me more as a convenient label than a state of knowledge.

In other news, I am losing my battle to remain healthy. I keep getting exposed to different flus and colds, and I am having difficulty staving them off. Meantime, I thank you for your patience, as I know that the DSL remains a bit problematic. I am looking into 768/768 SDSL, with some level of service guarantee, but I'll need a dedicated line, which means a third line, in order for the new thing to go active, then cut over all at one time.... I don't know.

Today I start principal writing on Chapter 24, external services (DNS, FTP, Mail & such). It's just an overview chapter, but it is actually harder to prune book size topics down to 4 pages each, and cram six of them into a chapter than it seemed back when we wrote the Table of Contents. <Grin> Anyway... Back to politicking, here's a campaign piece from the upcoming SVLUG elections:

Subject: svlug] VP campaign speech
   Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 16:26:19 -0700
   From: Don Marti

I am one of the candidates for SVLUG Vice President. Here is an advance
copy of my campaign speech.  Permission granted to copy and redistribute
with attribution.


Good evening, SVLUG members.

In my campaign speech tonight, I wish to address the accusations of
elitism that have been made against Linux users. But what are we
really talking about when we say "elitism?" The notion that experts in
something, in our case information technology, know more about it than
some random clerk at Fry's, or your proprietary-software-using boss? If
you take some time to think about it, elitism is necessary and proper
to make the Internet work. Authority and expertise belong together. One
without the other breeds waste, frustration, and mindless repression.

This organization, and Linux as an operating system, have flourished
through the practice of naked elitism at its finest, and as your
vice-president I will not condemn elitism, I will celebrate and extend
elitism. (pause for applause)

Do you want to tell new users that they're good at something when
they're not, or do you want to give them a chance to get good? To
me, the answer is clear. We must give new users an informative but
challenging Linux experience that they'll thank us for later. This is
not a support group. This is not a motivational seminar. This is Silicon
Valley's finest information technology organization, and we must not
disappoint those who hunger and thirst after knowledge.

In every profession except for information technology, the judgment
of experts is respected and heeded. When a person goes in for surgery,
he or she does not demand that the surgeon use instruments from
Fisher-Price. But sadly, in many of today's workplaces, information
technology professionals are routinely ignored, then required to
implement stupid technology. I will not condemn, except of course in
jest, anyone who chooses to remain in such a job. But in (POUND TABLE)
this room our rules apply. We celebrate elegance, robustness, and
freedom. We will not pander to fools. (pause for applause)

Elitism is our strength and the beacon we hold out to those who would
join us. I ask all of you tonight, please keep SVLUG strong and
successful, and yes, please keep SVLUG elitist. Thank you and good
night.

-- 
Don Marti                                This email brought to you
[email protected]                           by the number 67 and the 
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/                  operator XOR.
whois DM683     Software patent reform now: http://burnallgifs.org/

Time for me to get into traffic. Have a lovely. TTFN.

Mornin'. I am continuing to fight with DNS and Bind 8.2.x. I will conquer it eventually, of course, but I want results now. Tom gifted me with a bunch of working stuff from his setup. I studied it, then went back to the DNS-HOWTO over at LinuxDoc. All I want to do for starts is setup a caching-only nameserver so that people can point to an internal service for NS. But I can't seem to get it running. I'm doing something SIMPLE wrong, I can just feel it. Maybe it's just time to strap on the Gatling gun from Predator, walk up to DNS, kick the door down, and go into Rock'n'Roll mode, hosing down any recalcitrant code or configuration files. I know, I'd just break things, but it'd feel gooooood!

In other news, KDE 7.2 RC1 along with KDE 2.0 is now humming along on Gryphon. It's excessive, I know. Total install put in something like 2.7G of files, but then I wanted the kitchen sink for the moment. Shortly, it'll be Debian. There are broken things in this edition that take the machine down like a rock. Setting the system time, for instance. Very weird.

Marcia's got pictures of her new office up, you can go look if you want. For me, I'm gonna take this sorry butt down to the office and try to get some work done. Then come back here, get DNS working and write about it. I mean, really, not resolving localhost. ::sigh:: TTFN

Good Morning! Let's see what's new... in sports, it's DNS:4, me:Zilch. But Tom sent me some new pointers of places to look, things to try. So hopefully things are to improve on that front. On the DSL side of things, after three days of absolutely horrid connectivity (Saturday through Monday last), it's behaved like a champion for the last two, although according to my logs it fritzed once last night, but the downtime script (thanks to the silent, but very, very busy Matt) cycled the power on the DSL modem and all was right with the world. This is, of course, the day that the PacBell tech comes out to have a look at things with me, so yeah, it'll be working perfectly until 17 minutes after they've left.

You'll remember (perhaps) that I parked the RC1 beta of Mandrake on Gryphon the Acer Travelmate, night before last. I wanted to see the improvements since beta-I, which was Gryphon's previous distro, and put on the RPMS of the new KDE2.0... Long story short - the three of them didn't get along. Something would happen, something non-repeatable in style, and the machine would kick over and die, screen would blank, system and keyboard locked, nothin'. I suspect XFree86 4.01, which I hadn't tried before, but who knows, too many new things.

So yesterday, behind me on the desk while I worked, I installed Debian 2.2, then Gnome Helix, then KDE2.0. Works like a charm. As previously noted, Debian doesn't have a pretty installer, and you actually get to specify your hardware by selecting the kernel modules to insert. I know a number of people that would hate this at first sight. But still, it's solid, solid. Maybe some screenshots this weekend.

Now to work with me, since I am putting in a short day. Later.

14:01 - Ready for anything... well, almost. It's been a real screwy day, and I haven't even really gotten going yet. First thing's first, the picture is of the back of the desk, after I cleaned up most of the rat's nest of CAT5, power, phone, speaker and the KVM clump. I didn't think to take a before picture, really. Shucks, it wasn't that bad, before... was it? Heh. So now anyway things are a bit more organized, and when the PBI tech shows up, he should be able to get to the POTS Splitter (the gray box wall mounted, upper right), if necessary. Previously, that was inaccessible in the same way that the spark plugs on an old Jaguar (remember, the one you have to demount and jack the engine to access the plugs?). Now the waiting game begins.

Meanwhile, at work, it was a quiet morning... too quiet. Turns out that our main telephone line was dead. Yeah, the lead line in our hunt group. That means that the line would ring (but not in our building), then go to voice mail -- on a business day. Farblegarp. With heaps of skizzle-excrement heaped on top. So I wended my way through the reasonably helpful MCI Worldcom corporate accounts department, finally got a trouble ticket opened, about 11:30. Just now I was informed that it's back online. Not too shabby, though I want to find out what went wrong, and where. I still won't use'm for personal service, however. They've slammed Marcia and I for the last time.

Now I am going to have a quick bite to eat, drink down some TheraFlu (to combat the increasing aches, pains and light-headedness), then kick over into "muck with DNS" mode. I am either going to beat it or temporarily shelve it. TTYL.

Hi. Welcome to Friday. I think I actually just might be on the mend. While I feel pretty washed out, and have some residual aches and pains, the worst of this mild flu bug appears to have passed. We'll see, we'll see, since I haven't really rested properly through any of this, it's possible to come back around and bite me once again.

On the book front, I made a little progress last night - I got an internal DNS setup working, but it won't resolve external names. And still I can't get the simplest example running, that of a caching nameserver. I have called in the big gun, Greg Lincoln, he who helped Tom on track with DNS on Hydras. While I am very much a do-it-myself kinda guy, I must have missed something in the buffet line when they were handing out the DNS-understanding part of brains... sigh. The book must go forward, and I don't have a month to kill, puzzling this out alone (much as I'd like to). So I have some homework assignments from Greg in my inbox this morning, and they'll be done after I get back from work.

The Pacbell DSL guy was completely and utterly useless. I had discussed two distinct possibilities with the tech support people: Line quality, and the Alcatel DSL modem. He was unprepared for either, offered absolutely no advice, and didn't even have a modem to try to sell me. I did make him stand out in the rain and pull, then re-punch down the pairs at the demarc, since those are in an external cabinet which suffers from the heat, cool and humidity of a near-outdoors experience. I'll be shopping for a new vendor shortly.

Marcia's back appears to be getting better rapidly. We found some orthopedic (?) foam sleeping supports to help her maintain good sleeping posture, and they seem to be working wonders. I'll try to find out where she got them from, and post the data, since there are many back pain sufferers on this wet ball of dirt.

Now off to the salt mines. Have a day <g>, later.

Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 10:39:21 -0400
From: Greg Lincoln {[email protected]}
Subject: Re[2]: Bind woes...

Ah, I think I am getting it now. Its been a while since I attempted to
get DNS working behind a firewall. Try adding this line in your options stanza.

query-source port 53;

You also might check your logs on Grendel to see if he's blocking
anything he shouldn't.

I think that may fix it. If not, let me know. Don't give up, problems
always have a solution. =)

-- 
Greg Lincoln
www.mazin.net

Success. It transpires that I was permitting specified nameserver IP
queries only through the firewall. NOT logged errors, just quietly
dropped. I added IPChains rules to permit NS traffic to and from ANY
site, and poof. Everything works. You see, I thought I had done my
main firewall in the same way that I wrote about for the book -
allow any DNS through. It turns out I was a bit more restrictive for
the real deal...

Thanks for helping me kick over the right rock. I knew I was gonna
feel stupid <g>

Doesn't that just take the cake. It's just like the maxim in any good dictatorship: That which is not permitted is forbidden, which is exactly how I want it around here. Unfortunately, I thought I had permitted something that I hadn't. Ah, well, at least I can now move forward with this chapter, at least until my next foop-ah.

Good morning (for another 30 minutes or so). From the wind and the clouds, a nice little fast-moving storm is blowing in, in agreement with the weatherbeings for once. I don't think we're likely to see anything like the deluge they experienced in the American Southwest this past week. I never want to personally witness a foot (30.5 cm) of rain in 2 hours.

I still can't tell whether this cold/flu bug is coming or going. It's not disabling (which in many respects would be easier to deal with), but instead is just grinding me down, like wheat between the millstones. Anyway, I'd best get to work. Tom and I agree - we want this book done! TTYL.

Hey. Back in the land of the living. 10 pages in 6 hours and DNS is history (or rather, my current scribblings about it are at an end). I know much more than I did a week ago, and a large part of that is due to all of my struggles that were needless, had I only remembered that I had locked Name Servers down with my IP Chains firewall script. Bob comments on my trials...

>That which is not permitted is forbidden,

I think you mean, "That which is not forbidden is required, and that which
is not required is forbidden." (dictatorships are known for redundancy in
their edicts).

That method is why the old Soviet-bloc routers had so many problems. Instead
of using the Western "permit-deny" method, the Soviets used the
"require-forbid" method. Also, unlike Western routers, which simply discard
packets whose destination is local, Soviet hardware routed them to the
Gulag, where they were forced to serve out long sentences under harsh
conditions.
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
[email protected]
http://www.ttgnet.com

> Gulag, where they were forced to serve out long sentences under harsh
> conditions.

Is that anything like writing a book?

Hmmm. Anyway. Next is email, which is a simple explanation of the differences between MUA and MTA, then forward pass to chapter 25, which is devoted to Sendmail. Following that, FTP is at bat, then Apache, and INND. Sounds like fun, eh? Now to figure out what to have for supper - our favorite pizza place is apparently out of business, since the number has been disconnected. Oh, well. Gotta get away from computers for a minute, it's been a bit intense today. Take care.

Short Shrift time (thanks, Jerry), but anyway, Good morning. I've lots to do very little time, and still not much energy. As Tom and almost anyone else can tell you, slamming down some medicine and continuing to work is actually NOT the recommended method for taking care of a cold, flu or any other illness. That must be why we do it anyway - sheer stubbornness. Sigh. So, how are you?

Personally I have at least 17 trillion things that I am interested in and wouldn't mind wasting a year or twenty looking into them. Being a professional 'Net dilettante has it appeals, but doesn't put food on the table. Winning Lotto ticket, anyone? That said, I'd better continue my day - I've been up working on various things since 7, and there's lots more to do. Take care, y'all.