tales from the crypt( ) » archive

DNS

bruno — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 21:04:25 +0000

Domain Name Services for dummies:

Resources:

DNSStuff – Most tools you’ll ever need while away from your box (and some you never remember)
ZoneEdit – Free static and dynamic DNS hosting
OpenDNS – Free DNS resolution service. An alternative to the use of Internet service provider’s DNS servers (features a phishing filter, malicious site reporting and typo correction)

20060209

bruno — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 19:56:24 +0000

Just came across this:

Fon is giving away 3000 Linksys routers (model WRT54L) with their software pre-installed for only 25USD/EUR plus shipping and taxes (that’s 46 EUR for us, portuguese fellows).

Remember, kids. These routers can be reflashed using your favorite firmware and they’re still the most customizable piece of hardware you’ll ever find. A 802.11g router with a 4 port switch, two external antennas. A 200 MHz CPU, 32 Megs of RAM and 8 Megs of Flash memory.

I’ve already asked for mine…

Six Feet Under

bruno — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 20:26:22 +0000

So you think your corporate dress code sucks? Take a look at this one: The Burleson Consulting Dress Code.
Are you tired of explaining other people what RAID is? Perhaps you should present them this tutorial.
Did the Christmas shopping spree kill you? Before filing bankrupcy, why don’t you print your own Monopoly money?
Meanwhile, there are people getting scholarships with your tax money. And the final result sometimes relates to GPS: GSPS: GumSpots Positioning System
And yes, there are still Symbian developers with a twisted sense of humour:

(this is Profimail crashing and rebooting a Nokia 6630)

.scheduled maintenance.

bruno — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:40:51 +0000

If you can read this, it’s 4 o’clock in the morning, coffee is starting to kick in (g0d bless nespresso) and I’ve just migrated the server elsewhere. And I’m cooking Perl scripts over iptables to kick out referrer spamming from sites like http%%sborrate-in-faccia.com. And I’m reading Rui‘s notes over the last few months about bandwidth saving, image caching, PHP acceleration, the works.

In an hour or two, I’ll be feeling a lot better because the caffeine will wear off and the system and network will be stable and I’ve had learned more and had more fun than I’ve had for the last 2 years at work.

[as a side note, the Ubuntu installation was flawless and revealed a couple of interesting details. you can configure a keyboard layout by answering a couple of questions/requests like "press one of these keys (if you have it)"/"does your keyboard have the X key [y/n]“]

no-prato.com was also migrated, but there are still a few bits and pieces missing which I’m taking care in the next few hours. WordPress sometimes feels like the stupidest thing on Earth.

SQL Server 2005 woes pt. 1

bruno — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 20:45:53 +0000

As I didn’t follow the herd of zombies and moved to a so-called “launch party” at TechDays, I had the chance to download the SQL Server 2005 ISO files out of MSDN and started playing immediatly with it. During the past 6 months, I’ve had my share of SQL Server 2005 brainwashing and I’ve haven’t figured yet where to begin at and how to filter marketing bullshit from genuine added value. The proof the product has been pushed too soon into the market is the fact that they decided to let go a couple features (database mirroring will only be released for production usage in the first half of 2006 – I bet it will be included with the first product fixes in Service Pack 1) in order to release a stable product.

Developer edition is contained in a 2.8Gb file (which is still downloading at a blazing 8KB/sec). Enterprise edition is a ~800MB file. Any differences in features? Nope. According to Microsoft, Developer edition has the same feature set as the Enterprise one, the only difference is the licensing policies. So I tried merrily to install the Enterprise edition on my laptop (client tools only, mind you) as I keep waiting to see what’s on the extra 2Gb.

First thing I’ve noticed as I was trying to cleanup the laptop September CTP installation was it simply refused to uninstall, claiming I didn’t have the correct set of installation files and I had incompatible components lying around. “Add and Remove Programs” didn’t help either, so I tried to install the RTM version over CTP – It wouldn’t let me, as it called the same unistallation procedure I was trying to run minutes before. The RTM version, unlike the CTP versions, didn’t seem to include a “cleanup” utility built to erase any traces of the SQL Server 2005 CTP installations… It was time for some serious registry hacking, which I let go after 45 seconds or so, as I’d probably screw the whole WindowsXP installation and cause an uncertain damage on the whole buggy but stable system. A quick peek at the Microsoft newgroups revealed I wasn’t the only one facing these problems. The workaround consisted of getting a little program built for the Microsoft Office installation which nukes away software installation entries from the registry. The procedure is described in this article (Windows Installer CleanUp Utility) and oughta work for anything you’d like to uninstall which keeps getting errors (it doesn’t cleanup the files or unregister DLL mammoths, but it will let you install the same thing over again). I proceeded to delete all the entries for .Net Framework 2.0 Beta and the September CTP which lied around here since day one, then deleted the matching files and directories (that’s C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL yadda yadda yadda and stuff). As usual, YMMV: the guy right next to me did an almost flawless uninstall.

Setup refused to install the server components on the laptop, claiming it failed to have the hardware and software pre-requisites. So far, so good. Leave the big tasks for the big servers, altough it would be good to have a local database server for some tests. Guess I’ll have to try on of the other “lighter” editions… .Net Framework 2.0 is bundled with the installation and the whole installation process takes ages (as expected) and writes gazillions of new registry entries (ditto) and fills up around 700MB of disk space (no disk space estimation is given anywhere during the installation procedure).

The good thing about lenghty installation procedures is you get a lot of free time to surf on the web. That’s when I came across this SQLServer2005 vs. Oracle10g comparison which I’m having a good time peeking at.

Management Studio (which replaces Enterprise Manager) is still sluggish, taking almost 130MB total of memory usage (512MB available) and ocasionally eating up the poor laptop CPU (Pentium M 1.4Ghz) entirely while I’m staring at a static list of databases on one of my servers. Oh boy… This is going to get worst when I actually begin doing something…