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Wednesday 31 August 2016

Not my fingerprint

I spoke too soon. It turned out that I'd installed Fedora 23 on that box that was taking a long time to log in to, and then upgraded to 24. But sshd hadn't upgraded, and the fix turned out to be "yum upgrade sshd".

I'm getting close to completion on the big upgrade. Today I diagnosed and sorted out a horrendous problem whereby my DNS to the new line wasn't working. It turned out that I'd left out a minor, but crucial, line in the DNS configuration file. When I'd sorted that out, everyhting worked.

My list of "things to do" is quite short now.

One of the problems of dealing with DNS problems, is that you don't get immediate feedback - it takes a while for your changes to propagate around the internet. I was using this tool. It's nicely made, and tells you how your DNS is doing around the world. I donated $10 to him as a thank-you.

Speaking of which ... an American friend of mine was badly injured. Facebook showed a stream of people sending their "thoughts and prayers", some suggested treatments, such as listening to a 528 hz tone "it worked for me". Not wishing to post a trumpet-blast against the uselessness of these well-intentioned people, I did something a bit more practical; I paypalled $10 to her with the instruction to spend it on her favourite chocolate. That's a problem with being an atheist; religionists can just pray and tell themselves that they've done something to help, we have to do something actually useful.

Anyway, back to the upgrade. I called Daisy to cancel my old line. That shouldn't come as a surprise to them, because I've been making claim after claim against their "Service Level Agreement" on the basis of 24 hour outages. And I called my Cheltenham host; they were also a bit surprised - I've been happy with their service, but not so much with their pricing, and the chap I spoke to was surprised that I was paying so much. Too late now, I've already moved. I've always said this - look after your customers, or someone else will.

I might have one computer there as a kind of insurance, but only if the price is right.

We're going on a well-earned  holiday soon. Have you noticed that holidays are always "well-earned"? Anyway, I'll be taking a laptop with me, so that I can occasionally log in to my servers and be reassured that everything is working well. But I started up the laptop that I use for this, and it wouldn't start. It's behaving like the battery is all but exhausted and the mains power doesn't get through. Fortunately, I have another one just like it sitting at the home of daughter.1, used for a similar purpose, so I'll get that back and use that instead. And now I'm buying a replacement laptop for the one that died. Maybe. Because there's an alternative. Daughter.2 gave me her old laptop. It's got two keys missing on the keyboard, plus she wanted an Apple. The missing keys are no problem, I'll just plug in a little USB keyboard. I've installed Fedora 20 on it, so that might give me what I need.



1 comment:

  1. For the DNS Propagation, here is another similar tool
    dnschecker.org
    which has 100+ public servers available to check the propagation results. Means give better and detailed propagation results. You must also check it out.

    ReplyDelete