Zaf’s Blog

Sometimes you choose not to use a particular business’s services. Maybe its they don’t look right, maybe its a gut feel, but either way you make that choice. Its really nice when later on, you can see that it was the right choice to make.

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So I’ve finally done it! I’ve finally ascended in Nethack. For those of you who have never experienced Nethack, run now. Seriously, if you find out about this game, you will become addicted. You won’t be able to escape. Run. Please.

Here is the nethack dump of my First Ascension

The ascension was nothing special, a lawful human Valkyrie. The only thing notable is I died twice (Amulets of Life Saving) and was carrying two more Amulets on my ascension (I really really wanted to make sure I survived).

I found the wand of wishing in the castle, and that allowed me to complete my ascension kit.

Recently, I had a problem with a MS Exchange system. On boot, Exchange refused to start, and the first real warning was:

Event ID 2102 Process MAD.EXE (PID=1448). All Domain Controller Servers in use are not responding.

There were a large number of other errors in the event log, but I initially thought this was the main one.

A long story short, it was a DNS problem. Exchange / Windows 2003 is hyper-sensitive to DNS issues. I have found that sometimes a small error with DNS won’t affect anything except in the weirdest ways. The Windows 2003 system that was running Exchange was a GC and a AD domain server.

The chief complaint from Exchange seemed to be that it couldn’t find the AD in order to begin loading. If you waited until the system booted, logged in, then started the Exchange service manually, everything seemed to work fine.

This implied to me to be a problem with boot ordering, but it still didn’t make sense, since there was a second AD server on the network, sitting there, waiting to help Exchange to its feet.

The critical error seemed to be in the Exchange servers DNS lookup entries. We had 127.0.0.1 (the Exchange server was also a DNS server – The exchange server was originally the first and only AD server on the network, some roles were never migrated off) but we also had a Linux firewall. The firewall correctly replicated the AD domain for the site, but it seems that due to a slight incompatibility, it didn’t replicate some of the _SVR records correctly.

Exchange was querying the Linux server, not getting the right result, and throwing its arms in the air and dying. Once we changed the Exchange server to use another other Windows AD server as its second DNS, everything came right.

This once again comfirms my golden rule:

If its a weird problem that might be related to Active Directory, check, re-check, and double-check your DNS configuration.

Recent news articles have armed guards taking down posters of the Saturn V rocket from various engineers offices throughout the United States. Apparently this all has to do with ITAR (The International Traffic in Arms Regulation) (I’m choosing to refrain from asking why law makers insist on using bad grammar when naming laws, well, almost).

As I understand it, the issue is that the Saturn V rocket would apparently make a really neat ICBM, and there is concerns that a terrorist organisation might find these plans, copy them, and build their own.

Lets just think about that for a minute.

If a bunch of terrorists, boy scouts, or anyone, managed to recreate the Saturn V rocket, which I remind you is the biggest rocket ever produced, at a cost of around 500 millon US dollars each (and that’s 1960′s dollars), they’d immediately be given jobs at NASA (and probably many other space-flight related companies). This is no simple beast to make.

Now, fortunately some more rational people have thought this through a little, here’s the best line I found:

The Saturn V rocket would make a wonderful ICBM, assuming of course your plan was to launch a payload of nukes, 50 engineers, and a grayhound bus carrying them all. Its a bit of an overkill.

What we have to remember is that this rocket was design to send man to the moon. The moon! This is a rocket designed to send stuff to the moon, not to the other side of the planet.

Would someone please explain to me how 1960′s rocket technology, which has been in the public view for 40 years, is now suddenly top secret?

Recent events have once again highlighted further Cross-site vulnerabilities. These problems are a fundamental problem with how the web exists. Although there are many solutions to protect against them, the only way to remove them altogether would be to alter the very essence of the web itself.

The recent big one to hit the news is Cross-Site Request Forgeries. The general summary is, if the user has logged into a web page (it doesn’t need to be open, just that they have preexisting cookies allowing them to visit the page without logging in), another malicious site can execute things on this page under the users authentication.

Below, I outline the problem in more detail, and outline a solution that does not require PHP session variables Read the rest of this entry »

Members of Parliament are on the clock when they in the House. So if they want to flip the birdie, sleep, or otherwise act improper, they should do it, like the rest of us, in their own homes. The ban on taking photos or television footage showing MPs acting stupid is not only stupid, its just plain wrong.

If my MP decides to sleep during his working day, then not only do I want photos taken of him, I want them blown up to poster size and plastered all over his area and over parliament. I’m not allowed to sleep on the job, nor should he.

I want continuous live coverage of the entire House, streamed over the Internet, available to all New Zealander’s to see what their elected officials are doing when they are suppose to be working.