jr conlin's ink stained banana

Thing is, i'm not 100% sure they're all related.

Since my previous router/modem combination decided to die, i've been having some weird DNS issues. For whatever reason, the DNS proxies on the router and modem don't always appear to work right. Sometimes sites resolve, sometimes they don't. Not just little crap sites, either. i'm talking "mail.yahoo.com" or "maps.google.com". Sites that i'm quite certain don't just fall off the web all of a sudden.

Sure enough, a few seconds/minutes later, sites resolve just fine.

Previously, i was using a combination of DNS servers (from my provider as well as OpenDNS). They worked (mostly) except for the timeouts or (my personal favorite) being told that "Google.com is not responding" and getting an OpenDNS guide/ad page. i started to think that the better solution was to just run an instance of Bind and have it deal with the flakiness (since if it fails a lookup, it simply doesn't alter the local database of names.)

Honestly, it's getting to the point where i'm starting to set up more and more local services for myself just because i can't always rely on them being provided remotely. Makes me wonder if i"m becoming the digital equivalent of one of those Montana survivalists.

Great, now i have this mental image of stringing barbed wire around my server and loading it up with downloaded pictures of ammo and tins of peas.

i come not to praise the D-Link model DSL-2640B ADSL2/2+ Modem with Wireless Router, but to bury it.

In radioactive waste.

And salt the earth around it.

Humanity has not yet achieved the proper level of vulgarity to describe just how repugnant this device is.

About a year ago. (Just over by a month or so) i bought one of these delightless spawn of unholy realms to replace a modem that had previously served me well for over five years. i welcomed it into my network, configured it and was reasonably happy that it successfully connected me with the Internet i know and love dearly. It repaid my love and affection by dying about a week out of warranty.

It departed this veil of tears after overheating and crapping out. Something that i'd not expect from a device located at the top of a bookshelf with plenty of air space around it and kept reasonably dust free in an room who's ambient temperature is only about 78-80°F. Also something i'd not expect to occur for a device on clean power off of a dedicated circuit shared with an ink-jet printer

So, now, i've decided, once again, that bundled crap is bad news and bought a Cisco N Router which i plan on plugging into a dedicated DSL modem i got from a friend. Said router came highly recommended by several folks.

i'm accustomed to getting one bad egg. i'm a grown up and fully realize that no matter how high your stated level of excellence may be, reality will simply find a way to dork with you. You get one pass. If said one pass turns out to be the qualified exemplar you have to offer, well then, whatever level of pure derision and hate i spew upon your mockery of an existence is not only well deserved, but asked for, signed in triplicate, and joyfully received like a skinny dipper at a septic plant.

The D-Link Router? That's going back into it's box and being returned as a failed device, which will hopefully be reused as shielding for future nuclear arms tests after being sent to North Korea.

Oh yeah, and i'd advise against the purchase of the D-Link Model DSL-2640B ADSL2/2+ Modem with Wireless Router. Unless you get into that sort of thing. Just try not to draw attention to yourself by making the purchase while wearing a ball gag and wearing PVC underwear.

Were this a more perfect world, this would have been the seventh post in the series.

My original goal was fairly simple. i wanted to own my own life stream. There are lots and lots of services that offer that sort of thing, with Facebook and Friendfeed possibly being the most well known. (And now, mostly joined like two opposing trains at high speed.) They go off and collect up the various bits of digital vanity we inflict upon the planet. The idea i had was to add a similar service to my personal domain. i may still do that, but the method i'll use will be radically different.

Mind you, this is nothing new. PlanetPlanet has been around for years and works rather well when pointed at the various RSS feeds for things of interest. Considering that i generally donate at most a dozen bits of information to the global trivia pool, i figured that i could reasonably service something on the order of 1,440,000,000 requests every two hours off that mostly static page which is still less than the population of the planet and several trillion factors above anyone actually interested in doing so.

And i'd still be under my bandwidth allocation from Dreamhost.

Of course, i didn't set out with that in mind. Nope, i was thinking of doing something with XMPP which would allow me to host even more simultaneous connections so that the adoring vacuum would instantly be made aware of my lunch decisions. It was a tad disappointing to learn that XMPP, while undoubtedly fantastic at handling tiny XML packets, still was effectively a polling solution and not some amazing advancement of broadcast over SCTP. (The fact that the server can "call back" to a registered listener at a later time is interesting, none the less, but definitely overkill.)

Of course, all of this is written out in long hand in the previous six posts you'll never read.

Instead, i'm going to go simple. i'm going to skip the complexity of creating stuff that ultimately nobody gives a damn about. i'm going to set up a Planet and use that to fetch all things me. i'd encourage you to do the same, partly because that way i can follow it, or even group folks together in delightful little bundles free of someone else's advertising or inadvertent data mining. i'll post further details as i make them.

Ultimately, like most of my life, i've learned that complexity is never the right solution, and sometimes it's best to KISSH.

Right, so, while thinking about various things, it occurred to me that it might be nice to have an XMPP mini-network configured so that i can try out a few ideas on how to make the universe a better place (well, except for sector 1239817ᶲ39.2. They're jerks.)

Thing is, every jabber server i've tried out so far has failed for various reasons. eJabberd seems to want me to learn erlang so that i can try to debug what the hell the error message means. jabberd2 gets about 90% there, except for the bits about wanting data stores pre-configured after it's installed but before it's run the first time. At least i think that's the reason it keeps returning "Authorization Failed" off of a base install.

Others are obviously abandoned, or broken in less meaningful ways. Yes, i could probably write my own server, but i'd seriously hope that for a fairly robust protocol, that really wouldn't be required.

So, nice people who wander by: Anyone want to suggest a nice, reasonably simple jabber server that i can config under Ubuntu – Jaunty? If it works, i promise to say nice things about you, it, and possibly strawberry poptarts.

Seriously, exactly what kind of activity leads to wearing out a miniskirt in exactly this pattern?

Likewise: isn't this stuff normally called soap?

i'll note that without my glasses, i swear that this said fire hydrant fluffer, and it made sense. Which i'd rather not talk about.