I just got off the phone with qwest and they�re still having trouble getting my website online. This time, they can�t update the rDNS, A, and MX listing for my domain. Hopefully it will be fixed by tomorrow, Monday at the latest.
There is a big difference between how the common user percieves how the Internet works and how it actually works. This is something I’ve been learning over the past week and it really makes me hate and appreciate the Internet more now. Let’s say you go to my website, http://www.andrewferguson.net. The first thing your browser does is check with the local Domain Name Server server. DNS servers are responsible for maintaining a listing of websites and where they point to. The DNS server will do one of four things:
Herein lies the key to why the Internet is a crazy place. Everything has to be specified. There are 9 types of records: A, AAAA/IPv6, SOA, MX, NS, rDNS, CNAME, PTR, and TXT. Here is the DNS record for this website:
andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN SOA ns0.xname.org. andrew.fergcorp.com. 2004102505 10800 3600 604800 10800
andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN NS ns0.xname.org.
andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN NS ns1.xname.org.
andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN A 70.56.95.233
www.andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN A 70.56.95.233
andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN SOA ns0.xname.org. andrew.fergcorp.com. 2004102505 10800 3600 604800 10800
The first line says that for andrewferguson.net, ns0.xname.org is the Start of Authority (that is ns0.xname.org has the official responsibillity to know where andrewferguson.net is located at all times).
2004102505 is the date this record was last updated: October 25, 2004, 5th version of the day. The next string of numbers are just timeout numbers and are not that important.
andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN NS ns0.xname.org. and andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN NS ns1.xname.org. basically says that ns(0/1).xname.org is a Name Server for my website.
andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN A 70.56.95.233 and www.andrewferguson.net. 86400 IN A 70.56.95.233 tells the DNS the actual physical location of my website. Note that both the qualified name and the www subzone are both listed. This is the actual information that the DNS server sends back to you, the user. Then your browser initiates a connection with 70.56.95.233 and you arrive at my website.
For fergcorp.com, the records look pretty similar. The one notible difference is the addition of:
fergcorp.com. 86400 IN MX 5 mail.fergcorp.com.
This says that for the domain fergcorp.com, all mail should be sent to the server named mail.fergcorp.com. The 5 indicates that this is the first mailserver that should be contacted.
That’s a lot of stuff to figure out. Thus far, I’ve covered A, SOA, MX, and NS. I don’t use AAAA/IPv6, CNAME, TXT, or PTR. The rDNS basically is the reverse of the DNS lookup. It takes an IP address and gets an address back. Reversing my IP address will always return fergcorp.com, it’s just the way it’s setup.
Wow! The wind is really whipping. I’ve never seen wind gusts this strong, never. Up to 127 kph! That’s so fast! The situation is aggravated even more because we’re right next to the mountains, so it really just whips down through here, making quite a bit of noise. The window even flexes a quite a few millimeters..
It could have started at the beginning of the year when Steinbrenner spent almost $200 million on players, more then any other team in MLB history. It could have been the fact that the Yankees have such baseball phonemes as Derek Jeter, ex-Mariner/ex-Ranger Alex "Payrod" Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, Hideki Matsui, Bernie Williams, Jose Posada, Ruben Sierra, or ex-Mariner John Olerud. It could be that Babe Ruth is back, with a vengeance. Or maybe it�s the fact that everybody, except for half of New York, hates the Yankees. Pompous, arrogant, snobbish: three great words to describe the Yankees. It could have started last year when the Yankees beat the Red Sox�s in the 11th inning. It could have started on Sunday when the Red Sox�s beat the Yankees in a win-or-go-home game with a 12th inning homerun by Ortiz. Maybe it was Monday when the Red Sox�s beat the Yankees again in extra innings, taking the to 3 and 2. Or maybe it was today, "[w]ith blood seeping through his sock and bravado etched on his face, Curt Schilling shut down the Yankees and – just as he wanted – shut up 55,000-plus New Yorkers…" forcing a game 7, and potentially upsetting decades of baseball tradition.
I spent this weekend at Kit�s. This was the first time we�ve had a three day weekend all year long. We didn�t even get Labor Day or Columbus Day off. Any how, it was nice to be away from the regular scene for a little while. I was also able to work on the Shasta Blasta 2004 video. The DSL is also not working as it should, so there is some delay in AFdN coming back up.
Wednesday�s are long. I hate that. At least there is no Chem lab next week.
After weeks and weeks of toiling, we finally get a three day weekend. All I can say is par-tay. Well, not really. I�m going up to Broomfield for the extended break. Nothing special really. But it should be a nice time to get away. In other news, when AFdN comes back online, and when I my new laptop, I will be updating the AFdN interface.
While Columbus was discovering America, I was at school. Why don�t we get any holiday�s off? I�m frankly sort of surprised that we get Christmas off. *sigh* Oh well. AFdN will be down later this week and should be back up by Monday. I will continue to blog offline and will update the site when it comes back.
I finally was able to see Fahrenheit 9/11 today. I thought it was an interesting movie (and I say “movie”, not “documentary”). Oxford English Dictionary defines a documentry as “4. Factual, realistic; applied esp. to a film or literary work, etc., based on real events or circumstances, and intended primarily for instruction or record purposes.” Fahrenheit 9/11 definatly does not fall under that definition. However, it did provoke some interesting ideas.
Dave Kopel, from the Independence Institute, has published the Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11. He explains each deceit in detail on his website: http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-in-Fahrenheit-911.htm. Moore as has a rebutal to such documents on his website: http://www.michaelmoore.com/warroom/f911notes/
There is also a counter movie called FahrenHYPE 9/11 that I have in my Netflix queue.
However, Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, or anything in between. You need to see this movie. Despite his method, and my distain for his movie, it still manages to make a few good points that need to be looked at.
Here’s my article for the third issue of The Oredigger:
The boundary of space is internationally recognized as 100km above Earth. On a clear Monday morning at Mojave Airport, the first FAA license Spaceport, Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne took towards the black sky. This was SpaceShipOne’s second flight within a two week time span that allowed it to capture the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE. According to the X Prize website, xprize.org, the contest is “modeled after Orteig Prize won by 25 year old underdog, [sic] Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris….After Lindbergh’s flight, passenger travel in the U.S. increased 30-fold.” The X Prize is “an international competition that will award a $10 million dollar cash prize to the first team that:
There were thirteen different teams from 6 nations. In the last year, only US based Mojave Aerospace Ventures (SpaceShipOne), LLC, and Canada’s DaVinci Project Team were in serious contention. However, on June 21st, 2004, Mojave Aerospace Ventures made it clear they wanted the prize, saying in a press release “[u]nder the command of test pilot Mike Melvill, SpaceShipOne reached a record breaking altitude of 328,491 feet (approximately 62 miles or 100 km), making Melvill the first civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere and the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings.” Only six days later, Mojave Aerospace Ventures officially gave its 60-day notice for the X Prize, planning their first launch on September 29th, 2004.
In a press release issued shortly after successfully completing the first flight, “At 8:13 this morning PDT, SpaceShipOne (SS1) coasted above the 100 km altitude point and successfully completed the first of two X-Prize flights. The peak altitude reached was 337,500 ft. The motor was shut down when the pilot, Mike Melvill, noted that his altitude predictor exceeded the required 100 km mark. The motor burn lasted 77 seconds – 1 second longer than on the June 21st flight. Melvill was prepared to burn the motor up to 89 seconds, which indicates significant additional performance remains in SS1.”
This leads back to the morning of October 4th. A short press release on the X-Prize website noted: “SpaceShipOne and Mojave Aerospace Ventures, LLC. team reaches over 360,000 feet to win the $10 million ANSARI X PRIZE…Brian Binney, who piloted the flight, was released from it’s mothership White Knight at 50,000 feet early this morning. Binney continued into space breaking the August 22, 1963 record by Joseph A. Walker who flew the X-15 to an unofficial world altitude record of 354,200 feet.” The prize was won. The future of commercial space flight is finally here.
To learn more about SpaceShipOne, visit
http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/
To learn more about the Ansari X Prize, visit
http://www.xprize.org
To learn more about the author, Andrew Ferguson, visit
http://www.andrewferguson.net