This Geek

Argh. I hate frustrating issues that make me want to pull my hair out. Not that I’ve got much hair mind you. I tend to keep it short. Number 1 short. It adds to the mean don’t fuck with me look. Which also means it’s too short to actually grab. So my point is moot. Gah.

The DNS servers provided by my ADSL link are pretty crap. They take ages to update, and sometimes give shit, so some kind soul pointed me at Open DNS. I immediately configured my LAN to use them, and I was A for away.

Now my only niggle with them is whenever I configure a new sub-domain on my name server, it takes a little while for it to propagate - which is normal in DNS systems - however, with one particular sub-domain that I configured for one of my brother’s domains, I just could NOT access it from my own machine. It was seriously pissing me off. One minute I’d get resolution and the site would load, and then next I would just get DNS errors.

Doing a local lookup kept returning an IP that belongs to OpenDNS - wtf?

So I browsed to their site and searched around a bit. Eventually I happened across this link which allows you to query the status of their DNS cache. So, I do the obvious. Of the 4 servers (or so) that they have, one of them was showing invalid data. And typically, it was that fucker that I constantly seemed to query. Fortunately they provide tools to fix the problem, so in less than 5 seconds, I had resolved the issue.

Now, grasshoppers, what does this lesson teach us?

RTFM - Read the fucking manual.

I’ve finally set up a blog via email facility, so I can now blog from anywhere that there is a GPRS signal. This post is essentially a test to see if it works. If you’re reading this, then obviously it does… Otherwise i’m just wasting my time talking to myself. Internal monologue is talking to yourself, isn’t it? At least it’s not out loud. I get enough funny looks as it is.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get with the times. I can upload to flickr from anywhere, and now post to my blog. And the world says, ‘big whoop’. :p

UPDATE #1: It does work… when I figured out how to get the frikkin’ thing to actually post - and there’s a minor issue with the flippin’ line breaks being converted to = signs… but I think that’s a client issue rather than the blog.

UPDATE #2: I’ve updated the back-end software which introduced a theme error, so I’ll be mucking about with themes for awhile until I find something I like.