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How to host DNS for websites & for DSL connected satellite offices

Mon, 03 Mar 2003 17:12:18 +0200
Trent Murgatroyd (trent from sa-info.com)

Hi

I have tried lots and lots and lots of things to get DNS setup properly, but can only get it to work intermitently. What I am try to achieve is a fairly small, fairly simple, multi domain DNS host for a few domains that my company owns, and then a few that we are/will be hosting in the near(ish) future. I have some linux boxes RH62/RH7x configured for various tasks like email, database servers, apache, samba etc. Some of the DNS authorities are with register.com, some with various ISP's. I can modify the register.com ones once I have the thing working, and will ask the ISP's to "hand over" the SOA's as well, but first I have to get the confounded thing to work properly.

I shall describe what I would like, using thumbsuck names and ip's, and would be VERY happy and appreciative if you could tell me how the config files should look.

lets say I own/have howdoesdnswork.com as my main domain, and host some others like:

	whywontthiswork.net
	imconfused.co.za
	plshelp.org.za

I plan to run (i think i have it working, but can't test properly till DNS works) a virtual domain mailhost (qmail based) system. I have a fixed IP/permanent connection for my main(own) domain which is on ip subnet 99.8.77.0


DNS server (primary) is/will_be 99.8.77.13 (using BIND8)
DNS server (secondary) is/will_be 99.8.77.12 (also using BIND8)
Mail server for howdoesdnswork.com (and in fact all above) is 99.8.77.2
Web server (for all above using apache virtualhosting) is on 99.8.77.4

You're probably thinking "Why is someone so clueless even attempting something like this", but I've gotta start somewhere if I'm ever gonna learn. Pls pardon my ignorance (& I'll pardon your sniggering ;-) ).

By what I have read, and tried and struggled with, I need zone files for each domain, each of which contains host info etc. Here are my attempts, comments etc still included ..... followed by a desperate request (on my knees, tears running down my face etc) for assistance/guidance/criticism.

See attached Murgatroyd.dns-configuration-files.txt

I would also like to get some info on "mail server splitting" - as in having a local mail server (proxy) on a DSL connected LAN which forward internet emails to a main server (mailhost) on a permanent connection, but transmits local mail as local mail, and then which downloads mail from the "mailhost" to the local "mail proxy" on a polled interval, but I'm probably pushing my luck here, so I'll post this one another time..... unless of course...??? I have a working system using micro%$#* but would like to get rid of ALL M$ products as soon as humanly possible.

Thanx a stack Trent

For DNS questions there's a great resource called "Ask Mr.DNS" - but he won't answer generic requests, they'd have to be reachable from the net. Still, his archives are catalogued by category at http://www.acmebw.com/cats.htm
This certainly looks like a solvable problem; if your patience wears too thin with Micro[snip] and your time too short, you might want to dig into the Consultants Howto. While by title you'd think it was "Howto become a consultant" it's really "Howto find a consultant". There's lots of 'em, but you may recognize a few names in those pages... Check out http://www.tldp.org -- The Scissors


fetchmail ? sendmail ? or sender ?

Wed, 5 Mar 2003 09:17:58 +0100
Chris de Boer (chris.deboer from rioned.org)

Hi

I hope this is a legitimate question: At faked.org a person subscribes to Info@fake.nl with his e-mailadress special.person@faked.org Okay, fetchmail collects the e-mails and sendmail distributes them on a linuxserver. What is weird: the sender sends to himself . . . in pine one sees: From: Info@fake.nl To: Info@fake.nl

Now I would not deliver such an e-mail . . . . But linux is politer and sends it to the local person of last resort.

I cannot but forward the e-mail to special-person@faked.org I do not want to mess myself with the sendmail and fetchmail configurations as they do perfectly what they should do with normal e-mails.

For your information I have put here-under what Outlook Express shows One blames me for not delivering the e-mail in the normal way . . . (Help !)

In outlook express one sees:

See attached Chris-de-Boer.headers-oe.txt


Router Question

Wed, 5 Mar 2003 14:41:02 -0500
K Seshadri (seshadribpl from hotmail.com)
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. I had extra fun snipping the bulky HTML attachment into shreds small enough to wheelbarrow off in a tilted over greater-than symbol. Clipping the equals marks off the line ends was gravy. -- The Scissors

Hi,

Excellent material on this site !!!

I have a small problem. I have two subnets: 192.149.1.0/24 and 192.168.52.0/24. I want all the hosts on one to see the others on the other subnet. In other words, I want to have NO BLOCKING of any service from either side.

I have been able to make the 168 network hosts see and access the 149 hosts. From the 149 subnet I can ping a host on the other subnet, but I can't, for example, see a PC's shared directories. Security is not an issue as they are both internal networks.

I am running Coyote Linux on a floppy.

Any help will be greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.

Sesh


Help wanted - ps2 shutdown...

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 15:58:48 +0000 (GMT)
Ruben Hansen (gbyte from mail.dk)
Response by corncob Pipe

Hi...

I had simular problem, the other way around... The BIOS have a function for ps2 keyboard and mouse power-up, check that it is set for your needs... The problem is that it doesn't work with all os-shutdowns :( Don't know how that come...

Ruben Hansen alias GbyTe

I assume you mean for APM features in the BIOS. I wonder if perhaps, this is BIOS specific somehow. I know that almost all BIOS's are "standard" in terms of options, but you never know......

Thanks, Ruben!


Simulating RPM Tool.

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 15:09:37 +0000 (GMT)
Suresh Babu G (gsureshbabu from siptech.co.in)
Response by corncob Pipe

Hi

Hello,

I got a lot of useful answers from this group for my previous question [TAG] RPM -Installing Packages.Thanks a lot to Thomas ,Ben,Breen,David and Rick.

<blushing>...you're welcome.

Actually i'm trying (to simulate the RPM Tool functionalities using C ) to develop a Java Packager Tool for handling *. rpm files in a Solaris Box. It should support packaging operations like Install , Query, Verify,Erase etc.

Sounds good.

As a first task , I'm tring to simulate the RPM Query option , to query installed packages.If we query an uninstalled package ,it should say it's uninstalled.It should generate package infos. as we get in : rpm -qi <file>. Also to query the listof files , pre & post installation scripts , list of dependencies, list of dependencies covered and not covered.I don't know how to use <rpmdb.h> file for generating these informations.

Hmmm, from my limited knowledge I think that you can just query the RPM database directly without going via <rpmdb.h>

Can anybody (in this group) help me in this regard?

Which part are you implementing in Java (I got 93/100 for that last semester :-)???

Any other suggestions that would help me to procede in this project?

Sounds like an interesting project. Readers, if any of you have done the same, or seen a project with this in progress, let us know! -- The Scissors


Internet providers in USA

Tue, 25 Mar 2003 10:44:06 +0100
Konqi (the LG Answer Gang)

Hi all,

I know that this list is called "linux-questions-only" and therefore I have to prove that it is indeed a linux question! So: I want to travel to the USA with my linux laptop and need some reliable internet access via modem or ISDN (is ISDN available there and which standard is used then).

In Germany we have something called "Internet by call" where you call a number and pay via telephone bill, you don't have to register and don't have to pay in advance.

What are the options to get a linux laptop on the net in the USA? Since some of you guys are living there, you may answer the question. A quick glance on google results has only shown me some Calling Card providers where you buy "points" and then use the web until they are empty. AOL (since it's not linux-compatible) and T-Online global access (since I'm not a customer) are no option.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

Heh, normally I snip sig blocks, but this seems particularly apt to the BitKeeper related mail a little later on this page. -- The Scissors
[Tux] You can do what I do, since I travel a lot: use AT&T. It's $20/month, and they have dial-up numbers pretty much everywhere; AFAIK, more so than any other service. The only caveat is, no outgoing SMTP - you have to use their mail servers to push your stuff out. For most people, that's not a problem; I just find it to be an annoyance. Easy fix: set up one conffile for a smarthost and one for a local MTA and swap them as necessary. For extra ease of use, don't run in daemon mode - just invoke the MTA per-message (and an occasional cron job in case anything gets stuck in the pipe.)
[Swirl] You know, if I faced that situation, I'd rsync or scp my outgoing mail over to my own MTA. That's what Andrew Tridgell does. (For that matter, I usually just ssh over to my MTA box anyway, where I have mutt perpetually running under GNU screen, interacting directly with the local mail sppol.) They don't block port 22 (ssh), do they? That would be a deal-breaker.
[Tux] You know, I just got a shell account with <freeshell.org>; that is an excellent idea. I'd really like the ability to keep 'Fcc's on my laptop, but I can always pull down the files.
[Swirl] Entrusting outbound mail to AT&T's smarthost seems an unjustifiable compromise, in any event. Not acceptable.
[Tux] Parallels my own attitude; however, I didn't have the means to support it until now.
These are interesting thoughts, but quite untrue to their nature, the Gang didn't answer the question as offered. If you know of a purely by-the-call internet provider in the United States, or you happen to be one, chime in, and we'll see that you get noticed. At the moment the very closest I can think of is some internet coffee shops have taken to selling daypasses into their wireless hookup, or sell hourly time while you enjoy the coffee, and hotels in urban areas are starting to offer high speed access, also paid by the day. You'd need a wireless or ethernet card respectively. Europeans please note that the phone system in the US rarely offers direct-plug ISDN - that's considered a business class data line around here. -- The Scissors

GENERAL MAIL


Escaping from BitKeeper...

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 13:18:13 +0100
Ben Margolin (ben from prince.org)
Response by The Scissors

I read your 'Greeting' in the latest LinuxGazette online and found it interesting, and correct. The last company I worked for actually switched from cvs, to BitKeeper, for all the cool features. Very long story short, after one year of us debugging their product, paying tens of thousands of $ for the privilege, and never having Larry McVoy stop being a pain in the ass, we dumped them and went back to cvs, and all was well (after they threatened to sue us, etc... at the time we definitely had superior lawyers, and they knew they had no case--but why even threaten? Leaves a bad taste.) Afterward, we missed changesets a bit, but not as much as you might think. And we got so much better performance for "simple things", that it made up for it, in our minds. Oh, and we could save the tens of 000s of $, which was in-line with our whole philosophy, anyhow.

My. I've no idea why large enough corporations think being a poor sport would keep them customers who are on the verge of flying the coop. One would think the other way happens more often - attempts to lure one back and all.

"Large enough corporations" I suppose -- BitMover is/was only a handful of folks. I felt they were very deceptive about the quality of their code (which did improve during the year we spent with it, but should have been that way to start with), and were obviously trying to exploit Linux (by convincing Linus to use BK), as a marketing tool. I don't believe LM has ever contributed to an opensource project, if that tells you something.

My own experiences of these systems have been with the bits only and not so much which the personailities that drive them. I'm all for people having pride in their work... but a little respect around the naighborhood here pays us all back best.

(Search Linux Gazette back archives on the title "The Coin of the Realm" for an interesting editorial on that. Issue 65, I think.)

It was issue 64 actually. OpenProjects has become http://www.freenode.net and if you enjoyed the concept, you might be interested in reading ESR's two papers that came after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" ... "Homesteading the Neosphere" and "The Magic Cauldron" ... since he explores the anthropologic concepts of "gift culture" and other modes of economics in more academic detail. -- The Scissors

It's too bad BitMover (the company) isn't nearly as cool as well as BitKeeper, the product, is. I told Linus in email (not sure if he ever even read it) way back when that, be careful, Larry is not really a "plays well with others" kind of guy. (This is probably the understatement of the week, but I'm in a charitable mood.)

Heh. Linus has been known to declare himself "not a nice guy" on occasion too. I've always found him gentlemanly, but I wasn't toe to toe with him on the right or wrong ways to implement a deeply integral kernel function, either.

Your comments were right-on, and interesting to read. I don't usually visit the site but maybe I'll try to do so more in the future. (And if you're curious, my current shop is all-windows, that's what I inherited... trying to slowly turn things towards opensource solutions, but it's quite the effort. I thought switching from SourceSafe would be hard, but it turns out they don't even use that!! Wow. We're going to use cvs hosted on linux, with the excellent and free TortoiseCVS windows clients.)

Ben Margolin

I'm glad you enjoyed my mangled thoughts on it all. Your response goes to show that one of the lessons of open source remains the ability to vote with our feet, ultimately enforced by the right to just plain re-do it ourself.

Let us know if there's any good stuff you'd like to see in our pages!


wordsmithing in Gibberish

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 18:34:28 -0800
Raj Shekhar (lunatech3007 from yahoo.com)
Response by Tuxedo T. Herring

This is with reference to " Perl One-Liner of the Month: The Case of the Evil Spambots" which was published in th LG#86. I especially enjoyed you defination of Gibberish.

Here is something I found in my fortune files. I am pretty sure wordsmithing in the Marketroid language is done using this procedure.

I wouldn't be surprised at all... Of course now I've just got to turn it into a Perl script.

See attached gibberish.pl.txt

There's something to convince your boss that Perl is the language of choice... :)

Thanks for writing, Raj - hope you're enjoying the articles! -- Tux

Here's a related link
http://dack.com/web/bullshit.html

-- Jimmy O'Regan

Extra cool. I loved the reader's comments. -- Tux


SCO Sues IBM

Fri, 7 Mar 2003 01:59:41 -0500
Paul M Foster (paulf from quillandmouse.com)
Response by
This looked interesting enough to toss the clipping in. Maybe we should have stuffed it in News Bytes, but the air compressor wasn't in at press time. The "groups of linux users everywhere" is a list of LUGs and service also hosted at SSC. -- The Scissors

Some of you may have seen the recent story by ESR on NewsForge about SCO suing IBM for billions over IBM's "disclosure" of SCO intellectual property to the "free software" community.

In a nutshell, SCO bought the Unix source and related IP from Novell in 1995. Caldera (which was never much of an "open source" company) recently became SCO, and since then, they have been looking high and low for who they could sue over their IP. A rumour surfaced a while back that they had retained David Bois to sue people, which they promptly denied. Now, guess who's leading the charge against IBM? Yep. SCO has become openly hostile to the Open Source community, and this looks like the desperate effort of a dying company to grab money by suing people rather than making a better product. IBM has the deepest pockets, so they get sued first.

Anyway, the whole point of this is that I recently received a package of SCO Linux software for distribution to my LUG. You may have received such a package as well. If so, I would encourage you to send it back to SCO with a note explaining (lucidly) why. I don't know that it will ultimately do any good, but maybe it will get their attention.

Paul M. Foster
President
Suncoast Linux Users Group (SLUG)


Thanks

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:14:43 +0000
Stephen Bint (mr_bint from hotmail.com)

I am sorry if this message is in HTML format; Hotmail doesn't give a plain text option, so I don't know what it's doing.

I believe you need to see: http://expita.com/nomime.html#hotmail -- Swirl

I enjoyed reading the letters page. It reflected the range of responses I received quite well. Just for your information, over 500 of your readers downloaded my library during February.

Stephen

On behalf of our missing Editor Gal, thanks, Stephen! It's good to know we snipped it just right. Loyal readers, I've also snipped the ensuing fragmented discussion about the nature of languages that sprung up among TAG ... you'll probably see something of that in a later issue. -- The Scissors.


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Published in Issue 89 of Linux Gazette, April 2003