bsod’s braindumps

Hurricane Katrina

After the relief of yesterday that New Orleans was spared a direct hit, news now comes in that indeed very bad things are happening, some report around 80% of the city flooded. Pumps are giving up and at least one levee is breached. In short, the city is flooded and the situation looks very bad indeed. The city is under martial law, which may help. I just hope that people are sensible enough to stay away from the devastated areas. The situation in the superdome seems to worsen, but at least everybody there is alive. Power is down in the entire city. Looting. I’m not a happy bunny. There is also extensive destruction in Mobile, Alabama and in Biloxi, Mississipi. The amount of destruction is overwhelming. Around a million homeless, and another 5 million orso without electricity.

Update: It seems that entire Louisiana is now completely closed to inbound traffic.

Update: Now they are talking about a second levee being breached. Obviously the levees are critical, and crews are hoping to plug the holes with 3000 pound (1.3 metric ton) ’sandbags’, dropped from helicopters. As of now, the water is still rising, according to a CNN report. At least one hospital seems to be evacuated, into the superdome. I’m not sure, but the impression I get is that once the city is flooded, it will remain flooded for quite a few days.

Update: There are now some 20.000 in the superdome, and ‘officials’ expressed confidence that the 3000-pound sandbag solution is going to solve the levee breeches in a few hours. In Biloxi however, there are fears of hundreds of deaths.

Update: Gov. Kathleen Blanco said that the superdome will need to be evacuated. The breeches still don’t seem to be fixed. Again, not good news. All I can hope for is that the city will continue to exist:(

Update: On CNN an official declared that they are still ‘coordinating’ the action to be taken to fix the breeches. I could hardly believe my ears. If this goes on into the night, an huge volume of water will flow into the city. As I understand, the city pumps are already under water. In short, the whole thing boils down to waiting for the water of the lake to get down to normal level, and then puncture the levees at certain points, letting the water out to a level that the pumps are above water level again. Obviously this scenario is gonna take a LOT of time. Okay, the fate of the city now rests on the people who are gonna fix the punctured levees.

Update: Well, scenes of utter devistation over a wide area keep coming in. I’m starting to get numb. I’ve been chatting with Tess yesterday, but she’s not online today. I don’t know if the power went down in her region, or where the remnants of the storm exactly are. I just hope everything is okay. Tess expected the storm to come over the day after tomorrow, but the depression is still moving fast, so it could have arrived earlier.

Update: I suppose there is not much else to say but that the next few hours will be the last for many people in New Orleans. It’s gonna be the end of this city, by the looks of it. This nightmare just doesn’t seem to end. And then there is so much more than just New Orleans. Other places are just totally destroyed.

Okay, i’m gonna sleep. I want to end with something positive, and that is tho things might get worse, eventually things will get better. Goodnight.

Sources: WSDU, wikipedia (see also the Talk page for most recent news)

Ongoing DNS troubles

Its great to run your own DNS name server. You can add hostnames to your little domain at will, and generally have fun with decent names for your websites, say http://blog.superstring.nl/ . Everybody should understand what typing that url does.

The problem with it is that you have to deal with BIND and SIDN. Configuring the BIND name daemon is not too hard, and even fun at times. My current nameserver, my old faithfull home router, is both primary and secundary nameserver for my domains. I simply have an alias on the internal network interface and those two ip numbers are ‘the nameservers’. With the arrival of my colocated server, it’s obvious that I wanted to run my primary nameserver on that box. Nomad offered to be my secondary nameserver, so I would actually have real redundancy, the way it was intended. This secondary nameserver is a slave of the primary, somehow. It’s up to Nomad to arrange the domain transfers as he sees fit.

But it gave me an idea: why not use my faithful router as a tertiary name server, also running as slave from the primary. That way, if my chello link or virt-ix stuff goes down, I can still refer to my boxen on my LAN by their name, as they all will use this tertiary nameserver.

About SIDN, well… to simply change the IP numbers of the name servers or add a third one, is really really hard. I’ve done it before and it all went smoothly. But this time, i’ve been mailing with my SIDN registrar, MvB, for over 2 weeks. It just doesn’t seem to help However today I’ve fixed everything the way he wants to see it, even tho SIDN itself claims that my original setup should work… I’m still in the dark who is right about this.

The question is: Can you enter completely new ns1.example.nl ns2.example.nl NS records with completely new ip numbers into an existing domain that already has ns1.example.nl and ns2.example.nl defined? We assume that all four nameservers are configured correctly. According to the SIDN NameserverCheck page, you can. According to MvB, you can’t.

I’ll spare you the complicated ‘updating glue records by resolving from the delegated nameservers’ simply because I don’t really have a good clue about what all that means. Anyway… Goodnight