Monday, June 3, 2002

A new photo from the Mac Net Journal I'm back and playing catchup after a weekend camping in the mountains on Eastern Washington. Lots of great scenery and fairly rare birds, and Natalie and I accompllished more research for our upcoming book! The photo I include today is of a trio of checkerspot butterflies that were gathered in a damp area along a stream through Wenas Basin in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains. I think these are Hoffman's Checkerspots, though they may be Northern Checkerspots. Either way, what a great weekend for birding and butterfly watching. In all, we saw more than 100 bird species and at least 14 butterfly species! [Mac Net Journal] Rob McNair-Huff posts some great images. He is inspiring me to post stuff that I have or have been thinking about. One project that I want to get done this summer is a discussion of the urban wildlife in Naglee Park. Our neighborhood is 6 blocks from downtown San Jose, but we have a remarkable array of birds and other critters that frequent the neighborhood. I'm starting to get a collection of images for the effort. 11:14:39 AM     Comment []

My DNS and web hosting nightmare ES Designs has been down for much of the weekend. No access to the site, no access to images stored on the site, and no access to email. The problem resulted from a classic "left-hand not knowing the right-hand" blunder. I started the ES Designs web site in 1995, registering the domain name through Best.com. They have provided DNS service ever since, even though they were purchased by Verio a while back. Last Fall, Verio migrated my ES Designs site from Best's servers to their own. This brought a number of enhancements at a lower price, so I was generally pleased. When I needed to create another web site for a different domain, I chose Verio. I got the new site up and running and noticed a couple of features that I didn't have with my ES Designs site. Most notable was the ability to edit my DNS zone record. This is cool, because I run a Manila server and editing the zone record for ES Designs is a pain. In my quest for making zone records easier, I transfered my domain name registration from InterNIC to Verio. So, now I have two, essentially identical web hosting accounts with Verio, plus a domain name registration. Unfortunately, the ES Designs domain name registration wasn't added to the ES Designs web hosting account. It got tacked onto the other account. Apparently the Verio folks who host my communityVoice.org web site and have the ES Designs domain name registration don't know that Verio is also hosting the ES Designs site (on another server). So when I tried to update the ES Designs zone record. I was told that I couldn't because there is not a web hosting account tied to it (but I could upgrade to get that). When I told them that I already had a web hosting account with Verio for ES Designs, they told me that it was inactive. When I contacted the Verio folks who host the ES Designs site they assured me that it was active. At some point in this conversation, the ES Designs domain name record was edited so that it no longer pointed to correct DNS. ES Designs was offline. Saturday morning, I was on the phone with Verio tech support and was volleyed back and forth from the two teams that control my two accounts. I finally found what I needed to reset the ES Designs domain name record to point the correct DNS. By Sunday afternoon, the update had propagated to the much of the net and ES Designs was back online. Today, I will see if I can get Verio's hands to recognize each other. 1:23:49 AM     Comment []