how much of a bad idea would it be to just point your DNS to the root servers?
Terrible. Since the root nameservers don't answer recursive queries, you wouldn't be able to resolve anything.
Examples:
$ dig -t any www.google.com @M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET com. 172800 IN NS A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET.
$ dig -t any www.google.net @M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET net. 172800 IN NS A.GTLD-SERVERS.net.
$ dig -t any www.google.cx @M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET cx. 172800 IN NS ESTIA.ICS.FORTH.GR.
Note that in each case, querying a root nameserver for a hostname returns only the address of another nameserver - one that should be capable of pointing you at yet another nameserver that holds the information you're looking for.
I posted this on Technocrat today, but probably stand to get more answers here:
I have a lot of respect for Matt Dillon (as does pretty much everyone who's ever owned an Amiga), but I'm not sure yet that this is a good idea. The early versions of FreeBSD-5 were a mess, sure, but they've somehow managed to wrangle the new complexity into something that really works and works well.
Still, I wish nothing but the best for the whole DragonFly team. If their ideas pan out, then the whole *BSD culture can benefit from them. If they don't, then hopefully we can learn from their mistakes. Good luck, Matt!
Likewise, all military projects, whether they are weapons systems or communications systems, are intended to further military goals, which basically involve killing people.
Some don't, except by the most tenuous "Kevin Bacon" routes. This one didn't, at least not intentionally, when I worked there. The military pioneered a lot of modern medicine, from plastic surgery (to fix disfigured casualties) to pretty much anything related to trauma.
Complain to the "upstream providers" of known spammers or spam sites/domains, asking that they disconnect the internet service of the spammers. (Automatic spam complaints are disabled at present.)
Notify senders of email tagged as probable spam that their email was intercepted, and give them a password to resend their email and bypass spam filtering if their email was legitimate. (Spammers almost never try to bypass filtering when warned this way -- in most cases, they don't even read replies to their mail.)
First, the only thing worse than having your domain forged by a spammer is receiving 50,000 bounce messages mailservers and people with CRM systems.
Second, some of my friends run confirmed opt-in mailing lists to distribute weekly newsletters. Their bane is idiots who report those newsletters as spam, even though they explicitly went out of their way to subscribe to it in the first place. The last thing we need is a program to take a human out of the loop by automatically reporting messages it mistrusts. I see that SpamBouncer claims to have temporarily disabled this feature, but the fact that it's listed as a feature and not as a stochastic denial-of-service system speaks volumes about the authors.
Always reject - never bounce. You'll have the gratitude of thousands of forgery victims and legitimate list managers.
Got your attention? OK. What I mean is that you really want to avoid crossover cables if you can. That's because except in the very limited (and relatively rare) case where you'll only ever be connecting exactly two computers, you're usually better off investing in a cheap switch and connecting through that.
In the almost inevitable situation where you'll want to add a third computer - say, a friend drops by with a laptop - you can just plug it in to the switch and start using it. If you've used crossover cables, though, you'll find yourself in a mad dash to the store for the same switch plus the straight cables to replace your now-useless crossover.
I understand that Macs can automatically sense which sort of cable you're using. If that's true, then at least start off with a straight cable so that you can still use it when you eventually upgrade to a switched network.
With modern database technology and highspeed connectivity how difficult would it be to map an IP address to any name with or without any number of dots distributed over a couple of hundred strategically placed name servers? Like a global telephone book.
That's how DNS works, except that we've all agreed to use the same list of 13 root nameservers controlled by ICANN that publish the same data. It's almost trivially easy for a DNS admin to add or remove servers from that list, but there's a bootstrapping problem: until enough sites are accessing a particular set of "alternative" servers, the TLDs that are only hosted on those servers will only be visible to a very small set of people.
There's no reason you can't start handing out.maxborn domains today - your DNS software almost certainly supports it - but the real trick is to convince the rest of the world to use it.
You've nailed it exactly. Supposedly, each company will want to rush out to register example.jobs in addition to example.com, but that's just dumb. What's so hard about www.example.com/jobs, or jobs.example.com for that matter?
I can't imagine a big push by webmasters to move their visitors off their primary websites onto another domain. They'd suddenly have a pack of extra issues to deal with, like realizing that their current authentication cookies that are set for.example.com won't carry across to their new site.
I can almost see the utility in adding a small set of additional TLDs (as opposed to opening the TLDs and being done with it), but the ones they pick are invariably stupid special-interest projects that maybe 15 people will use. I could understand one for, say,.rest for the millions of restaurants out there. Why they labor and strive to bring us.giantballofstring is beyond me.
I didn't RTFA. For the benefit of cretins like me, would someone explain what was special about his case that warranted that sentence? Why is he headed to prison when so many other spammers aren't?
Unfortunately the sentence has been postponed while the case is being appealed.
Um, I know we hate spammers, but isn't that how the system is supposed to work so that people have every chance possible to prove their innocence?
Still, the temptation to make a ironic Viagra spam joke here is pretty strong.
I am curious why it is you need IXFR. What kind of network do you have the is unable to send or receive entire zones via AXFR?
Two words: dynamic DNS.
There are a lot of little single-entry updates to some of our zones, and IXFR transmits only the changed entries to the slaves.
How come your zone files are so big, and how come you network is too slow to transfer entire zone files?
Reverse that: even though our zone files aren't terribly big, why would we want to transfer the whole thing each time? It's the difference between sending a patch file instead source tarball for every update. Isn't efficiency supposed to be a good thing, even when it's not absolutely necessary?
DJB's software is distributed as source code without any "license".
Which also means that you can't distribute anything but patches even if you wanted to. Forget about making it part of an OS base distribution, or using any his the proclaimed "better" code to improve any other projects. Basically, it's a proprietary product that happens to ship with source.
Put another way, I could theoretically provide instructions for replacing Windows' HTML renderer with Gecko, but that doesn't mean that it's a Free (or even Open Source) system.
I understand your point, truly, but I just don't agree with it.
Well, Gentoo is pretty easy to install if you know the right commands. In either case, though, the instructions are completely opaque to anyone who doesn't already know that system inside and out.
built-djbdns? Oh, that's right - it's not Free Software so Debian can't package it.
Something about configuring DNS. Maybe to run as "nobody", I presume. I guess we're setting up a cache directory in/etc? Something or another about localhost.
/var/what?
I'm not trying to slag on you, but those aren't exactly the most transparent instructions I've seen.
First, djbdns isn't Free Software, which means that a lot of us won't touch it with a ten-foot pole. See the recent BitKeeper debacle for reasons why that's the pragmatic rationale and not just an ideological decision.
so much more reliable than BIND
I have never, not once, ever had BIND fail. I doubt I'm the best DNS admin anywhere, so I imagine it works well for a lot of other people as well.
Why am I putting my users at risk?
Because my secondary DNS servers, provided by my registrar, are out of my control. I can't install rsync on them to support the functionality that Dan left out of djbdns.
If you're a DNS admin, don't waste your time with bugs from the 1990's.
I'll agree with that. Upgrade to the most recent version of BIND and get on with life. OpenBSD's support of that policy is a pretty strong endorsement.
Forgive my ignorance - I only started playing with "laptop features" in the last month or so. My laptop is an ancient POS (AMS TravelTech with a K6-3/366 underclocked to 333 because of heat-related instability). I installed Gentoo on it to squeeze out a few extra percent of performance by using moderate compiler settings.
Following Gentoo's software suspend HOWTO gave me working results on the first try; I click a button in my XFCE bar and the system suspends to swap before powering down. I turn it back on and 15 seconds later I'm back where I left off. Is that different than what you're trying to do?
I think you're all missing the point. I'd love to kick back with Wikipedia during a long plane trip and depth-first traverse myself into oblivion. I have friends who live in rural areas with bad phone lines who might still like to read a few articles. A lot of restaurants in my town still don't have wifi, so I can't browse during lunch.
I can think of a million and one reasons why having a fixed version that is instantly available would be a very handy thing indeed. I have all the Internet connectivity I could want (short of a neural interface), but I'd still probably shell out a few bucks for a copy.
in the English language constructs like this exist as well (e.g. railway consists of two nouns). The only difference is that those speaking English are not free to make up new ones.
That's right. "Railway", for example, derives from "railuswayus" and was not concatenated by English speakers. We also didn't coin "email", "Internet", or "loudspeaker" - we borrowed those from Swahili.
I'd go into more detail, but I'm off to check my voicemail and weblog (Spanish).
Deutche has an amazing built-in fractal encoding scheme. For example, the German version may say:
Gerflugenichterschweitzenbaggen.
whereas the English version has to write out:
Shortly after September 11, 2001, the United States attempted to rally its allies for a strike against the presumed Al-Queda stronghold in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, the RAR algorithm averages a 3% compression ratio on German text, in comparison to 82% for English and 94% for French - it's like bzipping a.gz file. On the other hand, there are significant savings due to the lack of entries on "sweet nothings", "pillow talk", and "Bavarian romantic verse".
Never mind. I mistakenly interpreted the subject as relevant to the question, and answered it instead of what you were really asking.
A: Because they can? Regardless, Sony would have a weird proprietary version within a month of the rest of the industry picking a standard. They'd call it Secure Sync (R), and charge you $85 for the privilege of not being to upload MP3s.
It's not so much that I'm pro-SUV as against someone claiming to understand my needs and wanting to limit what I can buy. If I need an SUV to do my job, then I want one and don't think I should have to pay extra taxes on it. Ending that loophole seems perfectly reasonably, though - neither should I expect an extra tax benefit over that of any other work vehicle.
Don't be a jackass. I live in a rural area where an SUV or huge pickup is a perfectly reasonable, efficient vehicle for the jobs it's used for. At the same time, a lot of people don't have the luxury of owning multiple cars, so they'll also drive the Suburban to work in the city in the morning.
So, which would you propose:
Only rural-dwellers are allowed to buy SUVs or heavy pickups, or
Only "practical" brands (like Chevy or Dodge) can make SUVs and pickups - none of that luxury brand silliness.
If either of those sound like reasonable ideas, then please do us all a favor and drive your Yugo under a Hummer, would you?
By the way, I drive a four-door sedan and have no need or desire for an SUV. The above has nothing to do with me personally.
Slashdot Mirror
Terrible. Since the root nameservers don't answer recursive queries, you wouldn't be able to resolve anything.
Examples:
Note that in each case, querying a root nameserver for a hostname returns only the address of another nameserver - one that should be capable of pointing you at yet another nameserver that holds the information you're looking for.
No, we literally do not. We do literally want to ban all nonstandard language usage, figuratively speaking.
I have a lot of respect for Matt Dillon (as does pretty much everyone who's ever owned an Amiga), but I'm not sure yet that this is a good idea. The early versions of FreeBSD-5 were a mess, sure, but they've somehow managed to wrangle the new complexity into something that really works and works well.
Still, I wish nothing but the best for the whole DragonFly team. If their ideas pan out, then the whole *BSD culture can benefit from them. If they don't, then hopefully we can learn from their mistakes. Good luck, Matt!
Some don't, except by the most tenuous "Kevin Bacon" routes. This one didn't, at least not intentionally, when I worked there. The military pioneered a lot of modern medicine, from plastic surgery (to fix disfigured casualties) to pretty much anything related to trauma.
I wrote up exactly such a system, although it's centered around Postfix and not Exim (but the concepts should be portable).
<plug type="shameless">
I also worked those instructions into an article, "Filtering spam with Postfix" in last month's issue of Free Software Magazine.
</plug>
Second, some of my friends run confirmed opt-in mailing lists to distribute weekly newsletters. Their bane is idiots who report those newsletters as spam, even though they explicitly went out of their way to subscribe to it in the first place. The last thing we need is a program to take a human out of the loop by automatically reporting messages it mistrusts. I see that SpamBouncer claims to have temporarily disabled this feature, but the fact that it's listed as a feature and not as a stochastic denial-of-service system speaks volumes about the authors.
Always reject - never bounce. You'll have the gratitude of thousands of forgery victims and legitimate list managers.
In the almost inevitable situation where you'll want to add a third computer - say, a friend drops by with a laptop - you can just plug it in to the switch and start using it. If you've used crossover cables, though, you'll find yourself in a mad dash to the store for the same switch plus the straight cables to replace your now-useless crossover.
I understand that Macs can automatically sense which sort of cable you're using. If that's true, then at least start off with a straight cable so that you can still use it when you eventually upgrade to a switched network.
That's how DNS works, except that we've all agreed to use the same list of 13 root nameservers controlled by ICANN that publish the same data. It's almost trivially easy for a DNS admin to add or remove servers from that list, but there's a bootstrapping problem: until enough sites are accessing a particular set of "alternative" servers, the TLDs that are only hosted on those servers will only be visible to a very small set of people.
There's no reason you can't start handing out .maxborn domains today - your DNS software almost certainly supports it - but the real trick is to convince the rest of the world to use it.
I can't imagine a big push by webmasters to move their visitors off their primary websites onto another domain. They'd suddenly have a pack of extra issues to deal with, like realizing that their current authentication cookies that are set for .example.com won't carry across to their new site.
I can almost see the utility in adding a small set of additional TLDs (as opposed to opening the TLDs and being done with it), but the ones they pick are invariably stupid special-interest projects that maybe 15 people will use. I could understand one for, say, .rest for the millions of restaurants out there. Why they labor and strive to bring us .giantballofstring is beyond me.
What - do you think Kevin Mitnick started a gang while he was in there?
No offense to residents of our correctional institutions, but I doubt most of them are in there because they went postal on their mailserver.
Unfortunately the sentence has been postponed while the case is being appealed.
Um, I know we hate spammers, but isn't that how the system is supposed to work so that people have every chance possible to prove their innocence?
Still, the temptation to make a ironic Viagra spam joke here is pretty strong.
Two words: dynamic DNS.
There are a lot of little single-entry updates to some of our zones, and IXFR transmits only the changed entries to the slaves.
How come your zone files are so big, and how come you network is too slow to transfer entire zone files?
Reverse that: even though our zone files aren't terribly big, why would we want to transfer the whole thing each time? It's the difference between sending a patch file instead source tarball for every update. Isn't efficiency supposed to be a good thing, even when it's not absolutely necessary?
Postage: $0.50
Employees dumb enough to brag about their slackness on Slashdot so that you can conveniently round them up and fire them: priceless
There are some forms of misbehavior you can't punish. For everything else, there's Human Resources.
Which also means that you can't distribute anything but patches even if you wanted to. Forget about making it part of an OS base distribution, or using any his the proclaimed "better" code to improve any other projects. Basically, it's a proprietary product that happens to ship with source.
Put another way, I could theoretically provide instructions for replacing Windows' HTML renderer with Gecko, but that doesn't mean that it's a Free (or even Open Source) system.
I understand your point, truly, but I just don't agree with it.
djbdns includes an AXFR server.
That doesn't do much for those who need IXFR.
built-djbdns? Oh, that's right - it's not Free Software so Debian can't package it.
Something about configuring DNS. Maybe to run as "nobody", I presume. I guess we're setting up a cache directory in /etc? Something or another about localhost.
/var/what?
I'm not trying to slag on you, but those aren't exactly the most transparent instructions I've seen.
so much more reliable than BIND
I have never, not once, ever had BIND fail. I doubt I'm the best DNS admin anywhere, so I imagine it works well for a lot of other people as well.
Why am I putting my users at risk?
Because my secondary DNS servers, provided by my registrar, are out of my control. I can't install rsync on them to support the functionality that Dan left out of djbdns.
If you're a DNS admin, don't waste your time with bugs from the 1990's.
I'll agree with that. Upgrade to the most recent version of BIND and get on with life. OpenBSD's support of that policy is a pretty strong endorsement.
Following Gentoo's software suspend HOWTO gave me working results on the first try; I click a button in my XFCE bar and the system suspends to swap before powering down. I turn it back on and 15 seconds later I'm back where I left off. Is that different than what you're trying to do?
I can think of a million and one reasons why having a fixed version that is instantly available would be a very handy thing indeed. I have all the Internet connectivity I could want (short of a neural interface), but I'd still probably shell out a few bucks for a copy.
That's right. "Railway", for example, derives from "railuswayus" and was not concatenated by English speakers. We also didn't coin "email", "Internet", or "loudspeaker" - we borrowed those from Swahili.
I'd go into more detail, but I'm off to check my voicemail and weblog (Spanish).
A: Because they can? Regardless, Sony would have a weird proprietary version within a month of the rest of the industry picking a standard. They'd call it Secure Sync (R), and charge you $85 for the privilege of not being to upload MP3s.
Next question, please.
It's not so much that I'm pro-SUV as against someone claiming to understand my needs and wanting to limit what I can buy. If I need an SUV to do my job, then I want one and don't think I should have to pay extra taxes on it. Ending that loophole seems perfectly reasonably, though - neither should I expect an extra tax benefit over that of any other work vehicle.
Do you also sit around reading changelogs so you can jump on something already pointed out? :-)
So, which would you propose:
If either of those sound like reasonable ideas, then please do us all a favor and drive your Yugo under a Hummer, would you?
By the way, I drive a four-door sedan and have no need or desire for an SUV. The above has nothing to do with me personally.