The final updates of 2011
I've been informed by a couple of people that the Debian Administration site is down. Sadly it is; at the moment the host isn't showing anything on the serial console and remotely power-cycling it isn't showing any signs of life.
At this time of year I don't want to drag anybody in to take care of it, so ETA on recovery/replacement hardware is Monday/Tuesday.
In other news I've made it to year five of the KVM hosting sub-project/thing. Originally started as a Xen host its been running happily for quite some time. I suspect next year, or the year after that the price/specification ratio will end up losing out and we'll cancel the whole thing - but there are no immediate reasons to make any change.
Finally I knocked up a simple tool to validate my TinyDNS records prior to uploading them. It is simplistic, but adequate to catch the kind of mistakes I make:
Honestly it probably wants to be rationalised a little more - and check records more carefully. e.g. Ensure that the host a CNAME refers to itself exists, and making sure that the nameservers specified are valid.
I just wanted to make something quick after accidentally uploading a zonefile where I'd managed to fat-finger several important records. le sigh.
Oddly enough asking on serverfault.com showed no real suggestions - other than actually running tinydns locally and doing a zone-xfer to validate records. Overkill and harder than I'd like.
Happy New year if you care about such things..
"I finished growing up, Léon. I just get older. " - Leon