Starting 9 days ago, all three of my DNS servers have been queried approximately twice per second by a small selection of hosts.  The query is the same each time: "NS .", i.e. a request for the list of root nameservers.  The servers are not configured identically: two respond with the requested data, and one refuses the query.

Anyone care to suggest ( Read more... )

My parents are having some major work done to their house, and have been persuaded (i.e. whenever they mentioned the project I pestered them) to flood-wire the house with data cabling at the same time. The construction firm has no expertise in such matters, and luckily are well aware of this and are happy to defer to someone who does. My parents ( Read more... )

Unless you've been living in a cave lately you'll probably have noticed that Icesave ran out of money, as did the Icelandic government; hence Icesave customers get the unique privilege of being part of the first major test of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), the "UK's compensation fund of last resort for customers of financial ( Read more... )

Yesterday was my project's 2008 showcase day, to which we invited anyone who's interested (mostly senior people from industry, and sponsors) in order to show them that we haven't been wasting our funding for the past two years. I would have been dreading this for months, except that I was far too busy panicking about other deadlines to panic about ( Read more... )

I just bought a new laptop (actually the same model as my old laptop - HP 2510p - for reasons which make sense only to myself). On first allowing it to boot, the factory installation underwent the following steps:

1. Boot Windows XP and start the usual first-run wizard (slightly customised such that it forgets to offer you the chance to create a non- ( Read more... )

I upgraded my home server, callisto, to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) prerelease yesterday, and in the process caused my copy of the MoinMoin wiki engine to be upgraded from version 1.5.8 to version 1.7.1. Now, I've been recommending MoinMoin for a long time as a sane, well-written piece of wiki software which is packaged sensibly in Debian and Ubuntu ( Read more... )

So an explanation of Kaminsky's DNS attack has been leaked by Matasano, but the explanation is dodgy.

If I were to tweak the Matasano explanation to be more interesting (and also conveniently involve CNAMEs as suggested), I'd say in the last-but-one paragraph that Mallory doesn't reply "CXOPQ.VICTIM.COM. A 6.6.6.0", she instead replies "CXOPQ. ( Read more... )

( I'm so sorry. )

It appears (from my fairly uninformed perspective) that today I have a choice in Abbey Ward between:

• A candidate whose party is filling the centre of Cambridge with duplicate coffee shops, fashion outlets and yet more cars (Lib Dem)
• A candidate who has so far maintained the status quo in the ward, which in many respects is not a good thing (Labour)
• ( Read more... )

In the manual for my new UPS:
the liquid in the battery is rodent, and it is harm to your skin and eyes