The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, February 25, 2000

Hack the Source, Part II

Mark has written some pages about hacking the Atalk driver in Linux. Another note not noted in the note: he reported that it doesn't work on another of his Linux systems—the major difference being a different network card. Is the Linux kernel that fragile that a difference in network causes a protocol stack to fail?

DNS Woes

Mark wrote in today to say that reverse lookups for my domain weren't working properly. And lo, nslookup was having a hard time finding the machine it was running on.

At first I thought maybe it was a problem with what I was trying to do with the latest version of bind. You see, I set things up such that I control the reverse lookup on the 32 IP addresses Atlantic Internet provides me.

This is done via an interesting hack. For the appropriate in-addr.arpa file, I have:

0	IN	NS	linus.slab.conman.org.
1	IN	NS	linus.slab.conman.org.

And so on for the 32 addresses I've been assigned. Then, for the namesever here in the Computer Room, I have:

1	IN	PTR	isdn.slab.conman.org.
2	IN	PTR	area51.slab.conman.org
3	IN	PTR	linus.slab.conman.org.

32	IN	NS	ns1a.aibusiness.net.
33	IN	NS	ns1a.aibusiness.net.

253	IN	NS	ns1a.aibusiness.net.
254	IN	NS	ns1a.aibusiness.net.
255	IN	NS	ns1a.aibusiness.net.

I've also set the nameserver to think it's a master for the in-addr.arpa zone I appear in.

So anyway, I thought the latest version of bind wasn't liking that. And it turned out that was true, to a degree.

There is no such TLD as .apra. Stupid typo.

Conman Laboratories monitors at Area 51

Not that I'm inviting anyone to try, but good luck trying to break into area51.slab.conman.org. You won't get very far nor is it a very interesting box. A Compaq 486DX/2 running at 66MHz with 20M of RAM and no harddrive.

Yet it is on the network.

It's running a modifed Tom's Rootboot disk distribution with some network monitoring software I wrote. I just thought the name was cute.

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