Wednesday, September 07, 2005
running name services a good thing
Just wanted to remember that running your own DNS nameserver in house is a good idea, especially when you'd otherwise be using comcast's abysmally slow set of nameservers. I had downgraded my inhouse nameserver from another box the other month and bind (named) didn't just work, so I fixed it by telling my dhcp server to just use comcast's name servers directly.Result: really slow initial web access to everything.
I got used to that [click] [PAUSE] [download] thing - as no doubt many without nameservers in their house have - but spending a few minutes fixing the problem (was a chroot issue) by running my own nameserver made a very noticible difference, especially as I visit many of the same sites every day....
I had also been running without privoxy for a while, as it's threaded version was running away on me. As I obsessively searched for news on Katrina I was astounded at the number of popup ads and the banner ads that I had been previously blocking. Yuck.
The unthreaded version of privoxy is noticibly slow (tis nothing compared to the dns issue fixed above) but runs forever.
Going back to the threaded version now... from cvs - maybe after I get out from the crunch of my current project I'll take a look at fixing that, too.
Lastly, I've been running with the realtime-preempt patch for linux on my dual opteron for much of the past few weeks. It's nice. For the first time I've been able to do some real musical work... I'll put a sample up of something this weekend.
Slashdot just had a nice thread on why some marsnauts aren't going anywhere soon. Two posters talked about asteroid exploration as a viable alternative, which warmed my heart.
ok, back to crunch mode. A ton of things to do this week, I'm signing off the blog for a while. ¶ 6:06 PM
