problems

Darn DNS

So, you should expect problems when you move your server to a new IP and don’t bother to update the InterNIC registration for your nameservers. It’s an area where I don’t have much experience, so I had to go looking for the solution.

Paul Woutrs gave some tips to get started in his short document on the subject. But the real lesson there was that I had to go back to the registrar where I’d originally registered the nameserver objects to change the registration. In Paul’s case that meant going back to Verisign, and in my case it meant Dotster. Fortunately I still have an account there, and Paul’s tips gave me the language I needed to navigate Dotster’s FAQs.

It was in thos FAQs that I found a link to the Verisign Whois Search, which has a little-used option to look up nameserver info. For some reason, that was more successful than my attempts at the command line with whois 'host ns1.maisonbisson.com'.

Also of note is the previously mentioned, and free, DNS Report service.

DNS Problems

Things went whacky with Dotster‘s hosted DNS services last night. Though the problem now appears to be fixed on their end (and I’ve actually move elsewhere in my attempts to get back online), it could be a while before the bad data is flushed from caches around the world.

In the meantime, let me mention that Ryan shared with me a useful tool I’d not seen before: DNSReport.

Trusted Computing: The Movie

Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel at Lafkon bring us this wonderfully engaging animated story of Trusted Computing. There’s lots more to the story at AgainstTCPA.com, and I need to thank David Rothman at TeleRead for alerting me to both the video and the site. I haven’t had much to say about TCPA, but I think […] » about 100 words

Jenny’s DRM Scourge

Jenny Levine, over at The Shifted Librarian, is telling the latest chapter in her long-running struggle with DRM. Now, I’ve installed a lot of Windows software in my day, so I feel pretty confident in my ability to double-click on an installation file. However, when I try to install [Yahoo Music Engine], I get three […] » about 300 words