DNS mystery

DNS has always been an interest of mine. Reading all of O'Reillys DNS book and joining AUDA when it was founded in Australia. Still a lot of people just don't get it ...

I stumbled across a good DNS checker site http://www.dnsreport.com/. You type in your domain name and it does a full test of everything, especially the MX and mail servers. In the times of increasing SPAM the setup of your MX is becoming real important as many providers are becoming so pedantic about everything being just right.

Its because of MX problems that I found this site. My provider, godaddy.com have some nasty email requirements. Sometimes people get a "553 Bogus helo" errors when emailing people hosted at GoDaddy. Can be hard to get this fixed.

Blast from the past

Well its amazing the things that pop up. I stumbled across a cache of an old page which I had created against Outlook. It was linked to off Bugzilla and got a heap of hits as a result. I think I have a copy sitting around on disk somewhere so I might dig out the version with the images to keep it up for prosperity!

Wow, where have those last 5 years gone!

Getting Television Right

I am not a big fan of television. It can waste a lot of time when one could be doing something so much better. Yet there is some good things to watch. Years ago I saw the Tivo in America. Its a VCR on steroids. Essentially it records to hard disk rather than tape and manages your recording schedule. It took a while for such technology to make it to Australia but eventually it did.

Introducing the Topfield set-top box which is a hard disk TV recorder that works in Australia. The good thing is that its a digital tuner so you get great picture quality. There are two tuners inside so you can watch something whilst recording something else or record two programs at the same time.

Now the big thing that made the Tivo such a popular product was its integrated TV guide. The Toppy (the common name for Topfield units) does not have a program guide service included. Two solutions are available. The first is IceTV which is a commercial solution, that means you get reliability and accuracy. The seconds is TEDS which is a free product (you can get some extra features at a cost) which works just as well.

With an up to date program guide, two tuners and a massive amount of record time a Toppy is a great way to watch TV. Record the regular shows you want to watch. Watch them when its convenient and skip the adds.

Does a Toppy mean you watch more TV, I have not found so. What it does do is allow you to watch better shows rather than just watching whatever rubbish is on when you want to watch something.

Gartner says "Hot, Cramped time for Data Centers"

Gartner are saying that Data Centers are filling up and therefore getting more cramped and much hotter.

"Gartner predicts that within 12 to 18 months organizations will have to make major changes to accommodate the heating and cooling challenges that come with more processing power."

What major changes are they going to make. You would have to figure VMWare is going to have a big opportunity here. Just look at the rebates one electricity conmpany are giving for server consolidation.

About Openfiler

Thinking about creating labs for VMWare the kicker is the resources needed to create a SAN. If you are going to play with DRS and HA you need to have the resources SAN based. With the support for iSCSI the Openfiler product could be a good testbed. Load it onto a old server with some disk space and you can have a simple SAN in a box.