When you look at dishonesty as a social disease, things get very interesting. I always believed that “The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching” (John Wooden), but perhaps there’s more to it than that. Character is also standing up for what you believe in the face of social pressure. Tricky double-edged sword, that is. However, it is worth careful consideration. This article gives some great food for thought along these lines.
© Robert Colburn for openphoto.net
Had an interesting issue today. One of the production systems suddenly went dark, and we found out about it from the client. This is never a good way to start a Thursday. It turns out that the client was having DNS issues and the domain was no longer valid. Relatively simple fix, crisis averted…
But why didn’t the monitoring system pick it up?
We use Dotcom-Monitor to check each of our sites on a regular basis. The monitor actually logs in to each website to verify functionality. What in the DNS world could cause this issue in such a scenario? How about a caching nameserver? Turns out, to limit the stress on their nameserver, Dotcom Monitor set up a standard caching nameserver that keeps a record in cache until the record expires. So even though DNS was no longer working for this site, the monitor thought everything was A-OK.
What can we do to fix this issue? Not much unfortunately. Dotcom Monitor will have to implement a change in their infrastructure which will likely increase the load on their DNS servers significantly. Since that’s not likely, it looks like I’ll have to build a service into our internal monitor (Zabbix based) to check for the domain against the SOA for it.
After configuring W3 Total Cache and playing around with google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool, I was able to increase The End of the Tunnel’s score from 49 to 96! This is impressive to me because this site currently runs on the basic DreamHost shared environment plan. No dedicated servers, no fancy configurations, just good cache management. Fantastic!
I was working on the site today and ran into an issue: Our caching DNS server (Windows 2008) was holding on to the old webserver’s IP. This wasn’t a problem for me locally as I used the old hosts file trick to point to the new server. However, this meant I couldn’t show other folks the site until either the cache was completely flushed or the record expired.
A little googling later, and I found this little command from ServerFault.
dnscmd dnsserver.local /NodeDelete ..Cache whatever.com [/Tree] [/f]
/tree Specifies to delete all of the child records.
/f Executes the command without asking for confirmation.
This allows you to clear just a small portion of the cache, as you define it. Pretty handy!
Welcome to the new The End of the Tunnel. This site is currently under construction. Stay tuned as I populate the site with back data, articles, and interesting links.
This past week, several of my friends and I went to the cabin to do some much needed renovations. I will be documenting these renovations over the next few posts and will link them here when finished.
Four of the five key players in this tale of triumph.
Originally posted on the Zombie Squad Forum on Wed Jan 05, 2011 1:02 am
I’ve been cooking for most of my life, even though my definition of cooking has changed considerably over the years. When I was young, cooking meant helping my mother in the kitchen with whatever she would let me do. It started out with holding a spoon here and there, to stirring the pots, to actually cutting up the veggies. Cooking was listening to what my mother told me to do, and following her instructions closely. As I grew, cooking became more complicated. I found cook books and cooking shows, which opened up an entirely new world! All of a sudden I had recipes to follow instead of just my mother’s words of wisdom. This evolution continued as I learned to “customize” recipes. Take a little from one recipe, a little from another, maybe change up some spices here and there… This led to some culinary triumphs, like the oddly delicious scrambled pancake, and many culinary failures; pancakes should never have tendrils. The evolution continued as I realized there were different techniques for cooking. I purchased the Culinary Institute of America’s The Professional Chef and worked my way through bits and pieces of it to broaden my horizons and skill base. I watched shows like Alton Brown‘s Good Eats and began learning how ingredients actually worked together. I started to see the patterns in recipes and come up with some of my own. But I was still basing my culinary work on existing recipes in one way or another.
Originally posted on the Zombie Squad Forum on Mon Sep 21, 2009 3:39 pm
“Shooters, Your 2 minute preparation period has begun!”
The chill from the night is still in the air as I lay down on an old carpet remnant and examine my loaned Ruger 10/22. Chamber flag out, wrap the sling around my arm “hasty” and lie down… The sun shines at a shallow angle and warms me. It also creates some glare in the tech-100 sights. I focus on the target and dry fire a few times. Wait, this isn’t right. I remember the training from earlier: align the sites, create the site picture, control my breathing, focus on the front site, get into the shooters bubble, squeeze the trigger, and follow through… I run it all through my head. So much to internalize!
Originally posted on the Zombie Squad Forum, Wed Feb 04, 2009.
Updates at the bottom of this post.
Wiggy’s makes a line of top notch synthetic sleeping bags right here in the good old US of A. They carry a lifetime warranty, keep their warranty even after machine washing, and don’t appear to loose their loft when compressed. All bags come with a compression sack and Lamilite pillow. A particularly nice feature is that you can combine two bags into the Flexible Temperature Range Sleep System, or FTRSS.
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