More DNS Woes

So what happens when your DNS changes more often than your IP address? The whole point of DNS is so that your IP address can change, and you don't have to update your links (also, there's something about being human-friendly, but who needs that?). Sadly in my case, athena has had a string of DNS subdomains that haven't lasted quite so long as I had hoped. My problem is that I link to pages from my blog (mostly containing pictures, audio, and PDF documents) that I would like to be accessible on a permanent basis. Recently, I lost athena.sexypenguins.com, and so I've moved to athena.goddns.net. At some point, I'm just going to have to purchase my own domain. Thus far I've resisted out of (mostly) momentum, but now that I've registered my first domain and found that it's not so bad to be parked, I'm more inclined to plunk down the money. The question is, what should I choose? In the meantime, I've decided to create an "athena-link" label on my blogs, that will at least keep track of which posts have links to athena, so that I can update them whenever I have to change the DNS, which it appears will happen at least one more time. For now (and for the first time in a while), all of my links are up-to-date. Another problem with my current setup is that FreeDNS's policies dictate that I need to have Google's ability to access my server manually enabled every time that I switch to a new domain. This wouldn't be that big of a deal, except that I've started hosting feeds on my site, and Google Reader uses Google's DNS. Also, Google just bought out FeedBurner, and one of my feeds uses that as a proxy.

I've Moved from Israel to Poland!

Well, technically speaking, my server, athena has moved its DNS listing from athena.gentoo.org.il (Israel) to athena.gentoo.ltd.pl (Poland). This occured because apparently the "Israili society for Free Open Source Software," which had registered gentoo.org.il, originally as a site to host a discussion board and support for users of the Gentoo Linux distribution, had apparently not gotten off the ground, and had donated their DNS listing to the FreeDNS pool at freedns.afraid.org, but that domain was now expiring or changing hands, so it was leaving the pool I've had to move before. Over the past year-and-a-half, I've been at:

• athena.homelinux.net
• athena.gentoofreaks.org
• athena.gentoolinux.be
• athena.gentoo-server.be
• athena.gentoo.org.il

As you can see, my method of chosing names has typically been to search for something with "gentoo" in it, and then add the hostname "athena" to the beginning of it. Changing domains for me involves the following:

• Setting up a new DNS entry with the domain server
• Changing the update URL in the cron script that updates the listing whenever my IP address changes
• Updating the PuTTY saved sessions on Windows boxes that I use to access Athena via SSH from outside the home network.
• Updating the links in my blog templates that point to Athena
• Updating all the links in all of my blog posts that point to content hosted on Athana (mostly pictures)--this one is time-consuming, and has the unfortunate side-effect of re-shuffling my blogs' RSS and Atom feeds.

It's those last two that are the problem. So, why do I put myself through this? It's getting to be pretty inconvenient to have to change all of this every few months in order to keep my links to hosted pictures unbroken. I know one thing I could do would be to pick a more stable domain to subdomain off of. Free DNS entries with "gentoo" in them tend to be unreliable for piggy-backing off of because they tend to belong to failed websites that are simply waiting for their registrations to expire. If I were to choose something more stable, it would last longer, and I wouldn't have to change all of the time. But I like having "gentoo" prominently in the name. It's part of Athena's identity: Gentoo is what makes her tick. I could register my own domain name, of course. It's something I've considered, and something I will probably end up doing eventually. Part of my reluctance is the fact that hacked-up, free DNS is very much in the spirit of Linux, especially Gentoo, which is geared toward customization and tweaking. Yep, I'm just another one of those free software hippies.

Athena's New Last Name

Okay, well it looks like gentoo-linux.be is no longer an option with freedns.afraid.org, so I've had to pick a new domain for my Gentoo box to be under. So, without further ado, the new DNS entry will be: athena.gentoo.org.il

I've had a long and sordid history with DNS on athena. First, it was athena.homelinux.net, then athena.gentoofreaks.org, then athena.gentoolinux.be, then athena.gentoo-server.be, and now this. Each time the domain owner has let their domain expire or withdrawn it from the available pool. You get what you pay for. Let's hope Israel is a better TLD than Belgium.

Free DNS

It's worth every penny.

Until today, I was using the subdomain athena.gentoolinux.be through freedns.agraid.org for athena's DNS. I have a neat little script that keeps track of what my IP address is, and then if it changes, it automatically updates the DNS listing for my box, and the world can keep on accessing all the wonderful pictures and such that I host there. This is all fine and dandy, but it so happens that the owner of gentoolinux.be is a bit temperamental, and so this morning athena was nowhere to be found. Oh, the IP address hadn't changed, ports 22 and 80 are still forwarded there from the router, and apache and sshd were chugging along just fine, but the DNS listing had disappeared.

I had no idea what was wrong. And I was counting on tar-ing up and transferring a Harry Potter sound track MP3 folder today. Bummer. My first thought was to interrogate RFH: he was doing something with athena after 12:30 last night, but it turns out all he did was watch an episode of "Jack and Bobby," so that was a dead end.

I didn't think to try just using the IP address until I got home and discovered everything was working just fine.

So anyway, I switched the domain from gentoolinux.be to gentoo-server.be, so now athena can be accessed via athena.gentoo-server.be. This domain is "public" at freedns.afraid.org, so hopefully there won't be another similar incident. I sent off a message to the owner of gentoolinux.be to ask him to restore my ability to use it. There are a grand total of 3 domains available for use with "gentoo" in them. It's not essential to have that in the name, but I like it there.

I updated the links on my blog template (actually, I changed it so that it only needs to be updated in one place at the top in a JavaScript variable that gets referenced several times throughout the page).

I didn't go through and update all the links in my blog entries, although I did do the Rattlesnake Ledge photos one. I discovered that you can't put JavaScript inside the blog entries themselves. If I get athena.gentoolinux.be back, then I'll leave things as they are, but if I don't then I'll have to go back through and update each link.

If someone wants to look at photos that have a dead link, all they need to do is click on the "athena" link on the top or bottom of the page and browse to ~tim/photos/.

<creative title>

Been up and running for a while now. I had a minor hiccup when the root partition failed fsck, but I was able to copy the files off to a backup parition, reformat, and copy them back. The failure happened at the same time as I had to manually turm off the computer (because it froze). I'm not sure if the filesystem error was the cause of the crash, or vice-versa. That's the second time it's happened. I'm thinking it might be ReiserFS, but I'm not overly worried. I pulled a backup script off the web and configured it to keep 4 weekly backups and 6 monthly backups at all times (once it builds up to that number, that is). There's a short list of locations you need to back up on a Gentoo system in order to be able to regenerate the exact same system in a straightforward and quick (ignoring compile time) manner.

I started using RAM/swap filesystems for /tmp and /var/tmp, and also for a writable /mnt/inbox folder shared via Samba. The inbox folder is capped at 100MB, while /tmp and /var/tmp are capped at 1GB and 3GB respectively. I have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of swap space. One nice benefit of this is that my compiles happen in /var/tmp, and the downloaded files are stored in RAM, so there's no time lost to reading and writing the hard drive.

The next step in my quest for the ultimate MythTV box is to become an expert (okay, well, maybe a knowledgeable novice) at configuring MySQL. I think that's the last step before I actually dive in to MythTV. We'll see.

In preparation for MythTV, I cleared out my 250GB Hard Drive (I moved the backup data from a partition on this drive to the one I had previousely been using on the 320GB drive for a 32-bit chroot--for which it turns out I don't have much use) and repartitioned it into one huge drive. I might break it up more later. That depends on the demands of Myth's storage scheme(s).

Athena has (has had now for a while) two internet hostnames: athena.homelinux.net, and athena.gentoofreaks.org

The first is updated through DynDns.org, which has limited selection of domains, the second is through afraid.org, which has literally thousands to chose from. RFH's router (a Linksys) can do DynDNS, so I moved that to there, and set up a cron script to update the afraid.org name.

I have Apache set up to route the two paths to different virtual hosts, but right now both of them are pointed at the same place, since I don't have much to put up. I also set it up so that each user can crate a public_html directory in his home folder accessable to the web, which is slightly more convenient than having to go to /var/www/localhost/htdocs/ and doesn't require that I give RFH write access if I want offer him hosting space.

Athena is on the web!

Well, sometimes.

I have apache server running on Athena, and I set up an account with DynDNS.org, so if you head on over to athena.homelinux.net, and she happens to be on, you'll get the generic apache default page. I haven't set much up yet. I don't really have anything right now that I want to put on the web that this blog doesn't take care of. I did put up a 1x1 transparent image that I reference from my blogs so I can get some sort of usage statistics to play with. I'll probably host some images and other stuff, but the problem is that she's not always on, so any website I put up would have a lot of downtime. The main benefit for me of doing the whole DNS thing is that I can ssh in from anywhere as long as I leave her on. Eventually I would like to have an always-on box, but that may have to wait.

There was a problem with the port forwarding. I was gone this last weekend, so my computers weren't being turned on, and the client table entry in the router for athena expired and was replaced by one of RFH's computers. All the ports that were being forwarded to athena were being sent to one of his Windows boxes. I need to figure out how to reserve an IP address.