Mick Solly, the gardener, along again this morning. On the positive side he significantly
removed many weeds, and the place looks the better for it. On the negative side he sprayed
the arena and the front of the house with weed spray, draining the battery of the sprayer
until it was completely discharged—and then left the thing turned on. By the time I found
it and put it on charge, it showed a voltage of 2.6 V, and no longer charged. That's the
second dead weed sprayer in a little over
2 years. Clearly Mick isn't the bloke to spray weeds, but I never found time.
Yvonne has offered to do so, as long as the thing weighs
less. That might be the best choice.
As planned, took a look at The
real story behind Wayland and X , a video presented by Daniel Stone
at linux.conf.au in Canberra in
2013. It was quite a disappointment. There was no description of functionality differences
at all.
Does Wayland
support multiple screens? My guess is yes, but it's just a guess. Does Wayland support
networking? Hard to say. The talk was somewhat rambling, and it pointed at known
weaknesses in the X implementation, but it somewhat
overstated the case. They were trying to get Wayland to the performance level
of VNC. But VNC has terrible graphics
performance, way behind X.
More to the point, the video is 7 years old. Why haven't we heard more?
There's not very much left on oldwww.lemis.com. I really should migrate the
remainder before the end of the month. The big one
is DNS, and in principle
that's relatively simple.
Or is it? The configuration files have now completed their wandering through the directory
hierarchy, it seems, from /etc/namedb/ via /var/named/etc/namedb
to /usr/local/etc/namedb, and of course sample configuration files have been
installed in /usr/local/etc/namedb. They're probably needed, as I noted when I
checked named.conf:
; DNS resource files for lemis.com
; Greg Lehey, LEMIS, 21 January 1995
; $Id: db.lemis.com,v 1.167 2019/12/10 01:41:03 grog Exp grog $
Is that date correct? I first registered lemis.com on 18 January 1997, and the first revision of the zone file is dated some time in 2002; before that I
didn't keep it under revision control. But it almost seems that I got the year wrong in the
header. Still, it makes a nice story, and clearly I should have waited a couple of days to
be able to celebrate the 25th anniversary. And equally clearly it makes sense to go through
the whole file and check what dead wood there is there. What I found was:
-
Remove almost all references to oldwww, move them to lax. I still need an
A record for oldwww so that I can access it at all.
-
Update SPF record.
-
Remove oldwww from MX records.
-
Update NS records
Apart from that I removed old CNAMEs and some other stuff. I have long forgotten what this
was all about, but blame helps:
1.2 (grog 12-May-03): microsoft IN CNAME panic ; horrible kludge for forwarding mail
1.39 (grog 20-Mar-05): firefly IN CNAME mojave
About the most obvious thing is that I have a long-standing tradition of disparaging names
for Microsoft machines.
Similar considerations applied to db.narrawin.com, which is much smaller.
And named.conf? Things have changed there, and I started looking at the sample file
provided, but my eyes went funny. In the end, I just tidied up the old one:
-
Change all references to oldwww IP to lax, in particular the forwarders.
-
Check the slave server for andyit.com.au, which I run for Andy Farkas. He said
that he didn't need to do anything, but he had forgotten the forwarder information on
his master name server.
Then there's www.lyrebirdtruffles.com.au, which is run via an external name server
which I can't access. Chris Bahlo will have to do that, and by chance (nowadays it's only
by chance) she was here for dinner this evening, so she'll get to it.
Startup was relatively smooth. I had the permissions set wrongly (owned by root),
and I forgot a file, but after fixing that and Andy's forwarders, all was well.
But sometimes I wonder about the messages that named outputs:
Jan 18 06:49:31 lax named[50419]: zone 0.0.127.in-addr.arpa/IN: loading from master file localhost.reverse failed: file not found
Jan 18 06:49:31 lax named[50419]: zone 0.0.127.in-addr.arpa/IN: not loaded due to errors.
Jan 18 06:49:31 lax named[50419]: all zones loaded
Jan 18 06:49:31 lax named[50419]: running
Are we done? No. This server is running in isolation, and it's not visible anywhere else.
When I'm happy, I'll copy the files to eureka, and then they will propagate
elsewhere. And then I'll need to update the glue records. Anything else?
