Thursday, October 31, 2002
Bwomp-chicka-bwomp-bwomp
Several years ago I was invited to a Halloween party being hosted by my friend Greg; his wife and kids were still in Israel visiting family so he didn't have any problems with hosting the party.
Not like we're a bunch of obnoxious party revelers to begin with.
The party starts, plenty of people show up, we have fun.
Several hours later there's about six of us still left, all male and with the exception of Greg, single. Greg gets into a mood and decides we should all watch some porn.
Now, this isn't your standard silicon-inflated video porn of today—no! This is the vintage stuff from the 70s when porn was filmed and there was still a pretentiousness of plot because, you know, it was art and stuff.
So there we were at Greg's house, about six of us, still in costumes from the Halloween party when Greg's Dad walks into the house to find us, all guys, watching vintage porn from the 70s (bwomp-chicka-bwomp-bwomp). He stares at us, a deer caught in deadlights; we turn and stare at him, caught like deers in a headlight. “Excuse me,” he mumbles, then turns and quickly leaves the house.
“Dude,” says Kurt, “That was your father!”
“Dude,” says Greg, laughing hard, “this is my house!”
Breaking names
I hate it when things just stop working for no apparent reason.
DNS stopped working here in the Facility in the Middle of Nowhere. It was working fine yesturday but not today and as far as I could tell, nothing on our end changed.
At first, I thought it might be another attack on the root DNS servers but in checking outside sources proved that wasn't the case.
Then I thought maybe our Internet provider was filtering out DNS traffic or something silly like that but Spring's Linux box, which was running a DNS server, could resolve fine.
I didn't have a clue, and Rob didn't either—and both of us weren't really in a condition to think things through (he's fighting a cold; I had just gotten up).
Eventually, I was able to get it working. First, I had to remove
query-source address * port 53;
from /etc/named.conf and making that change required me to relax
the firewall rules to allow all UDP in, since the name server will pick a random port to
send the queries out on. I could probably specify an unreserved port for
the name server to send queries and then strengthen the firewall back up.
Sigh.
It's still very annoying though.
