Well, it’s that time of the year. The 2007 Darwin awards have been released. Unfortunately, slashdot also posted the awards, so the site is down due to all the excessive traffic.
The gene pool has been chlorinated
January 12th, 2008Because it’s there.
January 10th, 2008A major historical figure has passed away this week. Sir Edmond Hilary was one of the great 20th century explorers. Hilary was a man who was faced with challenges through out his entire life.
When he was young, he was told that he was too small so he was never included in team sports. Instead, he used his disadvantage as an opportunity to read and dream of becoming an adventurer.
He learned about the sport of climbing where size doesn’t matter. He started climbing at the age of 16 and quickly found that he was stronger and had greater endurance than any of his companions.
in 1952, Hillary tried to ascend Everest with a British expedition that ended in failure. He was told it could never be done and to give up. Most people would give up and move on to other challenges. But in just one more year he tried again and succeeded.
What everyone should learn from this is that no matter what people say, you should never give up. When someone tells you that you can’t do it, don’t get mad. Use that as an opportunity to prove them wrong and do it.
Remember the only one that can hold you back is yourself. If you see a mountain that needs to be climbed, go do it. If people ask you why your doing what your doing, tell them “Because it’s there.”
Bad marketing…
January 10th, 2008Ok apple, what’s up with this?
I have a .MAC account. I use it specifically so I can sync my computers and use it once in a while to publish calendars and photos.
My account expired in december and I wanted to renew it. If I renew it online Apple wants to charge me $129 for a year. Instead I can purchase another ,MAC box for $79 on amazon and wait the 2 days for it to ship and I then can register for another year.
This is just silly. Why does apple charge FULL retail for renewal? Until, there is a discount on renewing, I will continue to just buy full retail releases (at a discount).
iPhone email.
January 7th, 2008Ok, for the last 4 days I have been struggling with getting the iPhone mail client to work properly when on edge.
The client works perfectly when on WiFii, but failed to connect when on edge. There are lots of postings of other people having the same problem all over the country. Knowing a few things about networking 😉 I started troubleshooting.
I found that with an edge device we could telnet to my hosts on port 80 and port 25 (web and mail), but failed to connect on port 143 (imap). I ran several snoops and noticed that we could see the packets making it to my server, but the imap session never being established.
I was running the snoops so I could see what IP address the devices are coming from. When I saw the bizzare names, I decided to start doing some investigating and noticed that there was a reverse PTR record, but no forward A record.
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% host mobile-032-162-049-101.mycingular.net.
Host mobile-032-162-049-101.mycingular.net not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
% host 32.162.49.101
101.49.162.32.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer mobile-032-162-049-101.mycingular.net.
Well, this was the lightbulb I needed. imapd is launched from inetd, unlike mail and web. Mail and web both have a daemon running on their own. All of my inetd services like imapd are wrapped by tcp-wrappers. A quick look at the tcpd logs showed:
Jan 7 11:09:37 c130 imapd[19384]: [ID 140027 local6.error] warning: can’t verify hostname: gethostbyname(mobile-032-162-049-101.mycingular.net) failed
Jan 7 11:09:37 c130 imapd[19384]: [ID 947420 local6.warning] refused connect from 32.162.49.101
So the problem is both AT&T’s and mine. Because I use tcp-wrappers, the connecting hosts MUST have a valid A record for the PTR. The fact that AT&T doesn’t have valid A records is not playing nice on the internet.
Now the world is starting to make sense. Why does this work for some people and not others. The reason is because they are still using old IP’s from Cingular, and not the new ones from AT&T. It appears that all of the mycingular hosts are missing the forward lookups.
So, I have my workaround, but ultimately AT&T needs to fix this problem. I will still suggest you open a ticket with AT&T and ask them to fix their DNS records. Properly registering IP addresses that are used on the Internet is not only a polite thing to do, but also prevents things from breaking that rely on valid DNS records.
Today’s iPhone ramblings
January 4th, 2008A few items today.
The speaker does not work well with noise in the room. It keeps cutting out. Not sure anything else could do any better though. I had my first lockup today. The phone would turn on but could not unlock it. It took me a bit to figure out how to reboot it, but all is back to normal. The first time this happens trying to answer a call will warrant a visit to the apple store.
This has been the only real issue so far. I am using edge as I type this on my iPhone. It tried to connect to an AT&T wifii but failed. My blog loaded pretty fast. Amazon was not so fast. So it’s still an unknown if edge is good or bad. More testing is needed.
Well, dinner has arrived so I am done for now. More details later.
