Programming follow up

Ryandev.dopefish.de, php, warxract, wow

I just noticed I never wrote a follow up about my script that periodically parses the official World of Warcraft statistics. Unsurprisingly I wrote a basic Web interface to access the stored data. Since I stopped actively playing Warcraft the project kinda faded off my “todo radar”. So it has been stuck on my development site for months -> http://dev.dopefish.de (not the only project stuck in development, my “Voice-Over-IP Audio Shoutbox” also grinded to a stop after I ran into a flash problem)

I’d say it is about 90% done, currently it monitors 450 guilds and more than 15.000 players each day. It works pretty good, better than I had hoped considering how unreliable the source of the data is. There are a few quirks left in the code that I will iron out the next week, then I will release it so that anyone interested in the code can use it. In retrospect it isn’t much more than a big Proof-of-Concept that can be useful for others planing on doing similar projects.

(E)DNS – Bind logging errors

Ryanbind, dns, Internet Stuff

Anyone that has upgraded Bind recently is probably wondering where all those EDNS error messages are suddenly coming from. Well, since I’d rather fix a problem than set up an ignore rule for tiger, I did some digging and found out this much:
EDNS is an extension to “normal” DNS and has been around for some time. The most often reason these error messages are triggered, is when a firewall decides to drop dns messages that it thinks are too big (> 512 bytes). If this is happening on “your end” than the best solution would be to simply fix the firewall. If this is happening on the other end, or if it is something more obscure like a Firewall blocking fragmented NAT packets, than you might be better off just disabling the logging for this situation. On my system /etc/bin/named.conf.local is included by named.conf (saves me any hassle when updating bind via the distributions packages since all my changes are in a separate file)

/etc/bind/named.conf.local
logging {
category lame-servers { null; };
category edns-disabled { null; };
};

This turns off logging for edns-disabled and lame-server messages. So you can concentrate on the more important logging messages 😉

Weekly Update

Ryanfirefox, ssl

Nicht wundern wenn ich nun hin und wieder auf deutsch poste. Ich will nur ein wenig Abwechselung hineinbringen. Sodele, was gibt es nun neues diese Woche? Ich habe für die Domain dopefish.de die automatische Weiterleitung auf https herausgenommen, da Firefox 3 so gerne motzt wenn Domains selbst signierte Zertifikate benutzen (leider auch die einzige Möglichkeit kostenlose Zertifikate zu erstellen). Natürlich funktioniert weiterhin https, nur eben jetzt ohne Zwang.

Wer Firefox 3 einsetzt, soll mal “about:robots” oben eingeben. Die Entwickler haben wohl in eine langweilige Minute was lustiges eingebaut.

Technisch hat sich gar nichts getan, ich war die Woche zu oft nicht daheim, um irgendwas besonderes am Server zu basteln. Dafür habe ich nun Kontaktlinsen die ich hin und wieder tragen werde. Ich habe die vor allem wegen den Sport geholt, da dort eine Brille teils extrem nervig sein kann (wenn z.B. beim Klettern das Seil knapp am Kopf vorbeikommt und die Brille im Weg ist).