greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: June 2002

  • Bouncy Bouncy Email, Part II

    So, because I can’t be bothered to RT(entire)FM, email to my account has (still) been bouncing back. Until now.

    You see, if you don’t tell Qmail that email to a particular domain belongs on that server, then Qmail will cheerfully and politely throw it back with an explanation of why. (Sure, it would accept email for the machine, but not for the entire domain.)

    Duh on me. I think I’ve got it fixed now.

    Now I need to figure out how to let my sister know how to get at her email. Given the events of the last three weeks, I bet she’s just a little bit miffed with me by now. Sorry, sis! =)

    So much for that smooth transition I envisioned way back when this debacle began, eh?

  • Hi! “(my name) is”.

    Thanks to Emily for turning me on to the latest silly Google meme to hit the web, searching for “(Name) is” on Google and posting pieces of the results. For instance, given the search “Karel is” I can retrieve these statements:

    Karel is verziend.
    Karel is awakened in bed when the newspaper – represented by a beeper – is thrown on the front porch of the house.
    Karel is best known for his plays.
    Karel is here to prove otherwise.
    Karel is to take on the tedious taste of squirreling around the tree branches and picking up the lights (beepers).
    Karel is a good medium for teaching such concepts but also has other virtues.
    Karel is a graphical approach to programming, developed at Stanford for our CS introductory courses.
    Karel is a published poet and writer.
    Karel is an unselfish person, always ready to serve and give good advice.
    Karel is a virgin, and when the beautiful, experienced Susan impulsively sleeps with him, he falls madly in love.
    Karel is a very prominent community artist in North Wales.

    Okay, those are the highlights from the first six pages worth of Google responses. Sadly, the “published poet and writer” is some other Karel. The other link is to a brief biography of the brothers Capek, one of whom is my namesake. Of the other statements, most are about something called “Karel the Robot.” If you’re conversant with the work of Karel Capek you’ll see how a robot came to share my first name.

    I think I’ll get to that story some time soon. As annoying as my name can be, I’m delighted to have as a namesake the man who brought the word “robot” to the English language.

  • Photoshop Wars, Bebop style

    A bright flash in the night. Tracers flit across the horizon. The report of distant cannon.

    It’s the Cowboy Bebop Photoshop Wars, son. Best find a place to hide.

    (EK, you rock.)

  • Welcome back, friends

    If you can read this (which may be one of the more inane phrases in the entire English language) then I’m happily back online and on my new server. There are still a few little quirks to work out, but for the most part things are under my control once again.

    Yay!

  • Northwest Link almost comes through

    Part of the process of bringing this site back online involved having Northwest Link point the DNS for my domain to the new machine I built. As soon as I was able to change my domain so that their DNS servers were in charge, I sent their hostmasters a couple of emails detailing what I wanted.

    All but one of the instructions was followed perfectly. You see, the new server is named “duckpond,” hence “duckpond.greyduck.net” being the machine name that email should be directed to. They did put that address into DNS… but put it in the MX record as “duckpond.greyduck.com” which, of course, does not exist.

    So email directed to greyduck.net is bouncing like a big rubber ball right now.

    That’s not all: Because the Request Tracker system I use to track “trouble tickets” is (was) set to email my greyduck.net account every week with a list of current tasks, and because Request Tracker is (was) configured to reply automatically to new ticket requests, and because email to greyduck.net addresses bounces, my RT system has almost three thousand new tickets, all from Northwest Link’s mailer daemon telling me that my email address is undeliverable. RT sees those notices as new tickets and replies, which generates another bounce, which generates another ticket, which generates another reply, which generates another reply, which generates another ticket, ad infinitum.

    I’ll be spending the next few hours here at the office, killing duplicate tickets, 100 at a time. *sigh* Just another lesson in system administration, I suppose.

  • If it weren’t for lousy luck, I’d have none at all.

    File this one under “The Joys Of Mergers And Acquisitions.”

    Invite.net has been sold to BizLand.com, which doesn’t support several of the key features that brought me to Invite.net in the first place. I got an email today that states that first thing next week my website and email will be transferred to BizLand’s servers.

    There’s a very good chance that this site will completely break when that happens. The best-case scenario is that the existing journal entries will display but comments and a lot of the “extras” here won’t work (not to mention some of my security settings), I won’t be able to add new journal entries, and there won’t be a damned thing I can do about it since SSH shell access isn’t an option with BizLand.

    My current plan is to have Europa, the dial-up provider I’ve used for many years now, point the domain at a box I need to build here at the office. It’s not the best solution, but at least this way I’ll control the box in its entirety. This is also going to cost me a little more. Such is life.

    Ideas and contacts are welcome. Be warned that this may be my last journal entry until I get this thing moved elsewhere. No point adding entries that may get lost anyway. Grr.

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