Inspirational Technology

Inspirational Technology
Kimbro Staken's views on Mac OS X, XML databases, and other inspirational technologies.

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Saturday, January 19, 2002

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10:28:14 PM

Here's a tip if you're running a home network behind a cable modem router, or some other type of gateway, and you're using private IP addresses. Setup a caching DNS server somewhere on the network and configure it to also resolve all your local network names.
If you're running Mac OS X you can do it on you local machine. Mac OS X comes with Bind, you just need to configure it and turn it on. Setting up Bind isn't easy if you're not familiar with it, but this is a pretty good guide for Mac OS X http://www.qwerta.com/macosx-bind-howto.html. I just did this and it went really smoothly, which is a rarity for Bind. I've setup bind many times in the past on other platforms and it always results in some kind of headache. Of course it helps that in this case I'm not serving a production domain. Don't bother with this if you're not comfortable with the commandline.
DNS slowdown is a really common problem and really affects Radio in particular. Radio performs much better now that it can actually resolve my IP address. You could also solve this problem by just manually adding hosts configurations, but adding the caching DNS is probably worth it as it will speed up general net access too. This will be especially true if your regular DNS servers are kind of slow.
9:06:20 PM

Yep, URLs work too, maybe I should actually read the documentation on Radio to see what other cool tricks it has.
7:52:10 PM

Interesting, I just learned that if you type something that looks like an email address Radio turns it into a mailto: link. I guess that's kind of cool unless you're writing about something like cox@home that isn't a email address. Oh well, guess that won't be much of a problem in the future since @home is dead. So does the same thing work with URls? http://www.xmldatabases.org/
7:49:41 PM

The woes for @home finally reached down to me today as Cox@home migrated off the @home network. Got knocked off the net for a bit, but I'm glad to see they found a way to keep the service going. I'm now switched over to the Cox network. So far seems OK, except they forced me to DHCP and now I can't get into my webserver because of my firewall rules. Oops, should have loosened those while I still had a chance. It really sucks that I have to lower the security of my box because of this.
Anyway, one really nasty thing I discovered is that WebDAV mounts pretty much kill your machine under OS X when the network goes away. I had my webserver mounted through WebDAV when the network went down and it slowed everything to a crawl while waiting for timeouts. This is a very serious problem with OS X as it affected things that shouldn't have had any problems. What do I mean? Well, launching a new app and then resizing a window would take about a minute. Once you got it to rezize the first time it was fine after that. Very, very bizarre. Why it would need to go anywhere near the network or the file system to do that I have no idea.
7:46:29 PM

Hmm OS X native emacs, that is something almost too frightening to contemplate. Let the apps roll on.
7:26:49 PM

Business Week posts special report on future of Apple [MacNN] More visibility for Apple from the mainstream press is great to see.
7:19:09 PM

AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat? [Slashdot] Whoa, what a rumor. This is a really interesting idea. They'd have a tremendous amount of work to do to make an AOL OS out of it, but this sure would be a nice hammer to use against Microsoft. If this happens, the next few years are going to be very interesting indeed.
12:10:57 AM

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