Archive for the ‘Boring Tech Crap’ Category

17
Jan

dns queries

   Posted by: Jesse Cole   in Boring Tech Crap, Interesting Tech Crap

In a previous post i explained how i run a server, etc. etc. Since i have absolutely nothing else to write about, i’m posting a part II of sorts for that post. This time its about the dns server i run. A few months ago i switched my internal network over to use my own locally hosted dns server. The following are the top queries its received from the internal hosts.

16527   time.apple.com
16188   www.google.com
4513   weather.wapp.wii.com
4235   ad.yieldmanager.com
2315   news.wapp.wii.com
1907   www.symantec.com
1852   ad.doubleclick.net
1612   105.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa
1347   cfh.wapp.wii.com
1320   202-177-19-148.kdd.net.hk.jessecole.org

Ok, we can see we have several very popular sites. The first is not quite what you’d expect, its time.apple.com. You don’t think about it but every computer and device you own likely keeps itself synchronized with a time server. Every time it goes to synchronize, it has to do a dns lookup. Actually this number is a tad distorted by the fact that my router decided it should update its time 10 or 11 times a day, (thank you Dlink). I actually got sick of it a made it use the ip address for time.apple.com instead of the hostname so hopefully that number won’t go up so much.

The next most popular query is for www.google.com. No surprise there. Every time you type in the website or use the search bar in your browser and possibly even just visiting certain websites will cause a query to be performed.

The most interesting out of all these though is the fact that, in my top 10 queries, 2 of them (ad.yieldmanager.com and ad.doubleclick.com) are well known ad servers. What a waste of time and bandwidth that is. In the future, i may start blocking queries to well known ad sites just to avoid giving them stats on us.

26
Dec

Slight Downtime

   Posted by: Jesse Cole   in Boring Tech Crap

So, something happened to my linux box on christmas day. The short story is, the mbr somehow got screwed up and i had to reinstall grub to the mbr.

The long story is that I was tired and didn’t feel like looking into it right then. I ran spinrite overnight (really aught to buy a legitimate copy of that) and went to sleep. The next morning spinrite came up fine for all my hdd’s, system still wouldn’t boot. So, i booted up my knoppix disc and did a file system check. My / partition had a few errors which it fixed. Reboot. Still won’t boot. The system would come up to the point where i would usually see the 3 second timeout for grub and just do nothing. This is where i decided to reinstall grub and see if that fixed it. I booted into knoppix again ran grub and issued these commands.

root (hd0,0)

setup (hd0)

quit

hd0 is my first hdd. ,0 specifies the partition (i have my /boot on sda1 and my / on sda2). This fixed it and now i’m back in business.

10
Dec

I’m a geek.

   Posted by: Jesse Cole   in Boring Tech Crap

I was perusing my google web history today when i noticed my top sites list.

Geeky top sites.

I don’t think anything could prove more that i’m a geek than my top clicked sites being things like wikipedia, thottbot (a world of warcraft database site), and tldp.org (the linux documentaion project). Leave a comment if you think you’ve got one better (or are even reading this).

15
Aug

Ok, i’m back

   Posted by: Jesse Cole   in Boring Tech Crap

I think something happened to the database, dont’ worry, its fixed.