Month: December 2006

Ubuntu all raid.

I have been working on and off on rebuilding my web server. I took the plunge today and wiped the box to start the OS install. It is a dell 2400 (cheap as I could get) desktop with a second PATA card and 2 80 Gig western digital drives.

I ended up creating exactly the same partitions on both disks and marking them all as raid. The server/alternate ubuntu 6.10 boot cd allowed me to configure 3 raid partitions one for /boot, one for swap and one for LVM. The lvm partition was then sliced up for the OS.

The install finished and the box booted. The new boot system in 6.10 edgy is very fast the system came up in seconds. The only hick-up is md3 was marked as dirty so I am waiting for it to resyncing before doing anything else.

I have never got a system to install and boot to from linux raid. Very cool

I finally lost it with AITDomains.com. I have been having on going issues with them for years. They were a small scratch that just kept annoying me but not enough to finally say piss off. On tuesday they finally did it. One of my domains wasn’t auto renewed.

After about 30 minutes on the phone with a guy that kept telling me it was my fault I finally gave up arguing the issue hung up on him and faxed in a form so I they could charge me a small fortune to have my domain renewed.

Almost every time a domain comes up for renewal they refused my credit card online. I would have to phone up and get them to manually run it and it would work perfectly. To add insult to injury they ask for your username and password when trouble shooting your account.

So the year on my credit card had expired and I didn’t get any emails saying that the auto renew had failed.

On looking at my mail logs I find that

mail-20061125.gz:Nov 21 10:56:04 griffon postfix/smtpd[8340]: warning: 208.234.1.116: address not listed for hostname aitdomains.com
mail-20061125.gz:Nov 21 10:56:04 griffon postfix/smtpd[8340]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[208.234.1.116]: 450 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [208.234.1.116]; from=<support@aitdomains.com> to=<XXXXXX> proto=ESMTP helo=<appserver.aitdomains.com>
&ltappserver.aitdomains.com&gt

So the root cause is aitdomains.com couldn’t be bothered to configure a reverse dns lookup for 208.234.1.116

Interestingly they have now fixed it

116.1.234.208.in-addr.arpa. 86382 IN PTR aitdomains.com.

So by fixing something have they admitted guilt?

So I have initiated a transfer of all my domains to godaddy.com. I unlocked my domains to allow the transfer and kicked it off. I followed there FAQ

How do I transfer my domain name registration away to another registrar?

You will need to contact the registrar you want to transfer to and find out how to submit a request from their system. All you have to do on our end is to make sure the contact information on your account is up to date so the requesting registrar will not have any problems obtaining authorization for the transfer.

So my contact information was correct, and I sat back and waited for the auth codes needed to give to go daddy to get mailed out. An hour later still nothing. I opened a support ticket asking for the authcodes for all my domains. I got a response back saying please specify the domains you want. Wait didn’t I say ALL my domains. So I listed them and they escalated the ticket and get the codes for all the domains except my .org domains. After questioning that I get am told that .org domains don’t need authcodes. A quick call to godaddy and they point me to https://www.pir.org/GetAOrg/FAQ-General.aspx#q11 which specificly says that I do need an auth code. So I reopen the ticket again and the ticket gets escalated again and get all my auth codes.

So now I am checking every couple of ours to see if 1) the expired domain has been restored and 2) all my other domains have been transfered away from the crapy service of AITDOMAINS.

If you are considering using AITDOMAINS.com don’t they truly are awful. The website hasn’t been updated in years. They frequently fail to process vallid credit cards.

Treo 700p + Kinoma = abuse of unlimited data plan

New toy. I read a review on www.treocentral.com for the new version of Kinoma 4EX. After reading it I ended up buying a copy for my treo 700p. In the past I wanted to be able to play back a movie file my paretns sent me of my neice walking, but I ended up failing. The player that comes with the 700p only works with content from the blazer web browser and wouldn’t play the file from a SD card.

After the $20 special purchase price from treo central I am abusing my unlimited data plan. Kinoma can play almost any streaming format and play windows media files, mpg files and flash videos. The 700p on verizon isn’t quite good enough to stream video from google video or youtube, but you can save the stream to the sd card and play it back later if you want the full experience. So in the car I listened to Clyde FM from Scotland while driving along i66 in washington DC.

I now really need a 2.5mm to 3.5mm converter cable so I can use normal headphones and hook it into the tape adapter for my car.