Archive for May, 2006

Mail bouncing again…

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

Yet again any mail sent to me is bouncing. This time it’s seemingly due to some incompetence on the part of my domain registrar, FreeParking. My MX records were working just fine, with my server configured as primary MX and theirs configured as secondary MX. Then at some point this afternoon they started publishing the primary and secondary MXs as their mail server even though, looking in the domain control panel, the MX records are still set correctly.

But that isn’t too bad, because surely mail will simply go via their server and still find its way to me, right? Wrong, because their server is refusing to accept mail for my domain:

550 I don’t currently handle email for that domain name (*NILD*)

So if you tried to send me mail and it bounced: sorry. Fixing it is beyond my control at the moment. I am hoping that the records will be fixed when their DNS server next updates, which happens every six hours. It’ll then take ~24 hours to propogate, so maybe by the end of Wednesday I will be able to receive mail again.

If you need to send me mail in the meantime, you can send to whatastatussymbol@gmail.com (I don’t care if the spammers get this address: I never use it normally and gmail has good spam filtering).

Edit: The correct MX entries are now being published in the DNS records. It will however take a while to propogate, so you may still not be able to send me mail.

Posted in Life, internet | 5 Comments »

Server Problems

Monday, May 15th, 2006

I’ve been having some major server problems over the last few days, which basically involved my ultra-stable-with-an-uptime-of-over-250-days (since the last power failure) server having kernel oopses and crashing hard. As a result the site has been inaccessible at various points over the last few days and more importantly, all e-mail sent to me has been bouncing since I’m foolish enough to host my own mail server off my ADSL line without a working backup MX (I had a backup MX, but they’d kindly changed their mail server IP address and not told me, so everything was bouncing).

All it actually was was overheating caused by the CPU fan running very slowly and one of the two PSU fans having stopped completely. Why, oh why must computers use these rubbish little fans which last about 6 months if you’re lucky?

Sigh.

Anyway, the problem should now be fixed (until next time) so if you tried to send me mail and it bounced, please send it again. Ta!

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Posted in linux | No Comments »

A new "community centred" distribution

Monday, May 1st, 2006

So apparently Linspire have decided to increase their commitment to Open Source/Free Software by creating a community-driven distribution, FreeSpire.

Arse.

This is nothing but a thinly disguised attempt to get some positive press for their company and commercial product in order to increase their very small market share. In the past Linspire have taken much from the community and given nothing back – in fact they’ve done everything in their power to contribute as little as possible. Specifically:

  • They take Free Software and make it available through their Click’n'Run warehouse – which Linspire customers have to pay extra to access.
  • Even when they do release something as Free/open source (because they’re required to do so because they’ve used GPL‘d code) they make it unacceptably difficult for people to use the source they make available – e.g. sources which don’t compile, silly dependencies on things in Linspire so you can’t use it on other distros, etc. etc.
  • When they modify a piece of software they don’t send their changes to the original developer for inclusion like other distros do, they just chuck the source somewhere and forget about it.
  • Not only do they support and sell proprietary software with their distribution, but they develop and sell their own proprietary software!
  • They did release the source for their Click’n'Run warehouse client, but only because they know nobody else will want to use it.

So after all these years of exploiting the community for profit, they make a "community-driven distribution" and all is forgiven… No doubt they’ll appreciate any help they get from the community with FreeSpire – since it’ll be increasing the value of their commercial distribution – but I would hope that the community will do to Lin/FreeSpire what they’ve been doing to the community since the company was founded: ignore it.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with companies making money from Free Software (ala Novell, Red Hat, Sun, etc.) but when all they do is exploit it then pretend they’re community-driven, it annoys me. See also this article at Groklaw: Freespire: A Linux Distro For When You Couldn’t Care Less About Freedom. It’s also rather distrurbing to see people who should know better getting dragged into it…

So please, if you want a real community-driven distribution from a someone who is giving back to the community as much as they take (more in most cases) look at Debian, OpenSuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and any other distribution without a "spire" in the name.

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Posted in linux | No Comments »