Site update

Hard on the heels of the DDoS attack on Saturday, this site was inaccessible for much of Sunday. (In fact I still can’t get to it from my Mac back in my apartment.) Put it all down to planned work, bad luck on Steve’s part, and bad planning on mine.

For a variety of reasons, Steve decided to move grommit to a new co-location center. The move was scheduled for Sunday afternoon (PST), and we all had plenty of time to prepare for it. As Steve describes in his blog, the move itself went OK, but he was caught out by a couple of bad Solaris patches that he decided to install. However by about 9 o’clock everything was up and running.

Everything except geoffarnold.com.

I’d forgotten that our DNS address would be changing, and at 9 o’clock I was enjoying the Tallis Scholars‘ concert at the Town Hall when I received an email from Steve reminding me to update my DNS configuration. After the concert, I headed home, worrying as I went about whether I could remember my login for everydns.net (and hoping that my on-file email address wasn’t the geoffarnold.com one – or, even worse, my old Sun address!). Fortunately I was able to log in and make the changes without any difficulties.

So how come I still can’t access geoffarnold.com from home? Put it down to lack of foresight on my part. The DNS “A” (address) record for geoffarnold.com, the bit that tells other computers what my IP address is, has a TTL (time to live) of 86400. That’s 24 hours, expressed as seconds. So any DNS server that retrieved my address less than 24 hours before I made the change is perfectly entitled to use that copy until the TTL expires. This means that everybody should get the new address in about 14 hours from now. If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have logged in to everydns a couple of days ago and adjusted the TTL down to, say 3600 (one hour). That way, when I actually changed the address, I could be sure that the stale information would be gone within an hour.

Next time, next time.

If you've been having difficulty reaching this site….

This is why:

OpenDNS, the San Francisco security startup that runs the PhishTank anti-phishing initiative, has been hit by a massive DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attack).
The 400mbps botnet attack did not affect the company’s core recursive DNS resolution service. The OpenDNS.com home page and corporate blog were crippled for about 90 minutes on Dec. 1.
The attack appears to be targeting EveryDNS, a sibling business owned and operated by OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch. OpenDNS uses services from EveryDNS.

I actually got hit from two directions. First, I use EveryDNS as the DNS authority for geoffarnold.com. Second, it turns out that one of EveryDNS’s servers was located in the same physical rack as grommit (the system that hosts geoffarnold.com), so the attack consumed most of the bandwidth into our (shared) switch.

This is unusual

I arrived at the Town Hall at 6:30 for the pre-concert talk before the Tallis Scholars recital…. only to find out that the consort is delayed en route. It’s now 8:30, the organizers have arranged an impromptu buffet reception, and if we’re lucky the concert will get underway by 9 or 9:30. But everyone seems cool, no-one is demanding their money back, everybody is just getting to know each other. I just phoned Chris, and he reported that their performance in Berkeley last night was excellent. They’re supposed to be doing the same setlist.

We just got an announcement; they are “passing Safeco Field”, so they should be here soon.

This feels very different from Boston….

UPDATE: The concert started at 9; it’s now the intermission. Apparently the delay was due to a 5-hour repair to the plane in Oakland – and then when they tried to push back, the jetway jammed!

But enough irrelevancy. The Tye Missa Western Wynde was just glorious. Well worth waiting for.

That's more like it…

From the BBC:

SECOND TEST, DAY TWO, ADELAIDE: Australia 8-1 v England 551-6 dec
Paul Collingwood became just the third England batsman to score a double century in Australia as the tourists took charge of the second Ashes Test.
He and Kevin Pietersen shared a record fourth-wicket stand, worth 310 when Collingwood fell for 206 on day two.
Pietersen was run out for 158 but Andrew Flintoff helped England reach 551-6, declaring with 10 overs left.
Flintoff then had Justin Langer caught at slip for four in the second over of Australia’s reply in Adelaide.

UPDATE: But… good grief! How could such a wonderful start have led to this debacle???

SECOND TEST, ADELAIDE, DAY FIVE: Australia 513 & 168-4 beat England 551-6 dec & 129 by six wickets
Warne took two wickets and helped in a run out in the morning
Australia won the second Ashes Test by six wickets and went 2-0 up in the series after bowling England out for 129 on day five in Adelaide.

Unprecedented? Absolutely: “No team in history has lost after declaring on a higher total than England’s 551-6 batting first in a Test.”
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…..

WiFi update

Just over a week ago I reported that I was having problems with my WiFi network here in the apartment. I think I may have solved the problem. I bought myself a Griffin Technology AirBase, and since then I’ve been getting a consistently good signal.
Griffin AirBase
Basically it’s just a heavy base with a power cord and a slot that the Airport Express snaps into. According to Griffin, it “increases effective range and signal efficiency for your network and AirTunes by raising the base station up into the room. It also makes it easier to check the network status light at a glance.” And it seems to work. I guess that hiding the Airport Express unit away, plugged into a power strip behind the set-top box and DVD player, wasn’t such a good idea….
(Even though the Griffin Technology website will sell the AirBase for $24.99, you can do better. I paid $13.83 at Amazon.com, and some places have it even cheaper.)

Too much of a good thing is wonderful….

Chris blogged that he’s going to see the Tallis Scholars tonight, and mentioned that they’re going to be playing here in Seattle tomorrow, Saturday, at the Town Hall. True, but that’s not the whole story. It turns out that they’re appearing at 8pm on both Saturday and Sunday! On Saturday they’re performing “Renaissance Masterpieces”, and on Sunday “Music from the Sistine Chapel”. What on earth shall I do? Go on Saturday? Sunday? Both?!

Heads-up: I'm heading across the pond

I’m heading over to the UK for a week, starting this Wednesday. I’ll be flying from SEA to LHR via ORD, getting in around 6am on Thursday. From Thursday through Saturday I’m going to be staying in Oxford, visiting my mother and brother (and hanging out in the city). Then on Sunday I’ll take a train in to Paddington, tube to King’s Cross, and a GNER train to Edinburgh. Amazingly, this is only my second visit to Scotland. (The first was a day trip in about 1975, when I was a post-grad student at Newcastle-on-Tyne.) On Monday and Tuesday I’ll be at Amazon.com‘s Edinburgh Development Centre for a variety of meetings. (Long-time readers will know that I’ve always been interested in the challenges posed by distributed development.) And I’ll fly home on Wednesday: BMI from EDI to LHR, then United LHR-ORD-SEA.
Now I just have to work out the crazy (and constantly changing) rules for carry-on bags on flights to and from the UK….
(It would be great to pop down to see some of my old mates from SunUK, but I don’t think the schedule will allow it. Plus I’m going carless on this one; I’ll be taking the bus from Heathrow to Oxford. Maybe next time.)

The wettest month on record

From The Seattle Times

Puget Sound-area residents spent much of Wednesday bracing for another anticipated snowstorm…. But the predicted snow was interrupted off and on with rain and November became Seattle’s wettest month on record. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported a monthly total of 15.37 inches late Wednesday, breaking the previous record of 15.33 inches….
At 10 p.m. Wednesday, snow was still falling in many parts of the city. Queen Anne Avenue, the major thoroughfare on Queen Anne Hill, was closed because of snow and police officers were chaining up the tires on their cruisers…. But by [Thursday morning] rain [will be] starting to wash away the snow that had accumulated since Sunday.

Seattle articulated hybrid bus
I must say that this is the first time I’ve seen snow chains on the rear wheels of bendy buses. Quite impressive. I wonder what happens to the bending mechanism if one of those buses starts to skid…..