paulproteus

JHU's DNS servers have been broken for the past forty minutes, according to a support person I just spoke with. I discovered the problem when I couldn't resolve supercore.laroia.net; it turns out that for any domain JHU insiders hadn't visited in the last half hour, the JHU DNS servers couldn't resolve it.

I told them on the phone about mydomain.com and island-of-freedom.com not resolving.

ACM chooses to rely on global Inernet servers for our DNS. JHU makes this a great pain: webapps.jhu.edu has a different IP address if you use global DNS servers versus using the internal JHU one. But because the computer science department's DNS server relies on the JHU ones, DNS is down within CS as well.

(Technical details: JHU's DNS servers seem to be unable to resolve (and then cache) domains that weren't in their cache around 8 PM.)

DNS uptime for ACM is a big deal to me, and it's going to be a priority of mine in this coming year where I'm chair. We've had problems with our own DNS serving in the past, but (1) we're getting better, and (2) our userbase is tiny .

David Sifry just spoke to the Engineering awards assembly here at JHU. It was cool. Hopefully he'll see my sign afterwards:

blogs.jhu.edu

Talk to me, dsifry!

UPDATE: Afterwards, he saw me, and congratulated my enterprising spirit for bringing such a sign . He said, “Barrel through 'em” in referring to people who get in my way. “You're doing something for the University!” (Tell me about it!)

He also said, “It's always easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” Well, um….

DRM is Digital Rights Management technology. It is software designed to take away your freedoms when playing certain media. For example, the iTunes store adds DRM to your music to let you play it on only three computers.

BoingBoing reports that Microsoft is distributing tools for the circumvention of Windows Media DRM. For consistency's sake, the individuals responsible should be jailed and the company heavily-fined.