12.10.04

Festsupportivus

Posted in Tech/Geek at 1:04 pm by Craig

I have a new name for family-holiday season, à la Festivus. It’s called Parentaltechsupportivus. Does winter cause an increase in incidence of router failures, random port blockings and other things of the sort, or is it just that proximity to a time when I’ll be able to physically beat on their computing equipment causes parents to just notice it more?
Dear  Craig Odd situation.   I  can send and receive email,  but cannot connect with the internet Do you have a prognosis and prescription?

12.06.04

Safari DNS failures

Posted in Apple at 5:43 pm by Craig

Safari has been failing to load pages from newly visited domains for a little while now. It’s been increasingly irritating. And I’ve noticed a number of people complaining about it in a range of mac forums, so it clearly is a pretty widespread problem which has cropped up recently. It looks like it’s due to some relationship between IPv6 and certain DNS servers — I haven’t tracked down exactly what the issue is yet. But I have found a work-around solution which works for me. Namely, to bypass my LAN DNS server if it’s failing to respond by adding my ISP’s DNS servers to the list of DNS servers advertised by my DHCP server. I’ve left my own DNS server at the head of the list, because for my LAN hosts I want to be able to resolve those names to their LAN addresses, which aren’t in the public DNS. So my /etc/dhcpd.conf now includes the line: option domain-name-servers 10.0.240.200,216.38.128.2,216.38.128.3; Of course, you should use your IP addresses, and not mine.

Stupid password policies and enforcement

Posted in General at 5:40 pm by Craig

I hate websites which have free registration and don’t even collect any important information, which force you to choose “secure” password which must be at least 19 characters long, not include any dictionary words or any sequence of 2 or more characters of the same type where type is in {alpha, numeric, special}, so you end up having to hit the “I forgot my password” button every subsequent time you visit the site. Just completely fucking brain-dead.