Replacement for DNSstuff …
For years I have used the services provided by DNSstuff do checkups on various domains to see if they actually exist and if they are configured properly. This was actually a good way to determine if email stuck for a specific domain was because there are just a temporary issue or if it was because the domain was not really configured as a mail domain.
For years they were a simple site, free, with advertising on the page, but very usable. Several years ago, they went commercial, with a $36 a year subscription for basically accessing the same services that were free. I don’t mind paying for a useful tool even though I always thought it was weird that they continued to have advertising on their Paid subscriber pages…
Now, with my account coming up for renewal, I see they now want to charge 100%+ more than before for basically the same service. Now they say that they have dropped the on page advertising and as a result needed to increase their feeds.
I think they need to rethink their business model. I fail to see how their costs have risen to the point where they need to increase their rates by more than 100%. They state that they are doing further development, but really, the only thing I am really intersted in is the basic DNSreport which has changed little over the years and certainly for me does not warrant a 100% increase in fees….
So, after a little looking I found a replacement for the key tool that I use… http://www.intodns.com. IntoDNS provides a similar tool to the DNSStuff DNSReport, close enough for me but at what used to be the price DNSStuff used to charge… FREE.
I got a kick out of IntoDNS’s blog posting that talked about “fees” where they said…
IntoDNS will continue to remain free as long as we can afford to host it (and as a hosting & web development company I don’t see how we won’t afford that in the following hundred years
).
As for the other tools that DNSstuff provides, most of which I rarely use.. similar tools can be obtained via other services which are all currently free, like:
http://www.iptools.com/
http://whatsmyip.org/
I mind paying for good services, but I’d like to know that I’m getting something for my money… So, instead of feeding the DNSstuff unexplained run way costs, I will instead make arrangements to make donations to the other tools listed above instead.
I wish DNSstuff well in their endeavors, but if you have to negotiate with your existing clients to keep them, you must be doing something wrong.
Playing with Solaris 10/08
Leading up to the New Years I spent time setting up one of my spare servers with Solaris 10 Sparc 10/08.
I’ve been waiting for ZFS support for root disks for a long time… now it is here finally for the Sparc version of Solaris. It’s been in OpenSolaris for a couple months already.
For the new install, I used two 72GB hard drive in a Sun V210 server. My primary server also a V210 has the same size drives but is using SVM for the root disks under UFS… It also uses ZFS but it will be nice to have a complete ZFS based server.
The first question that I will need to figure out is dealing with Flar backups… I want to make sure that the root backups are kept small so they don’t take as much room. Not sure if this means I need to limit the ZFS root mount to do that or if it figures that out on its one… someting to play with.
I also plan on trying out the new release of WebTools which is the next version of what used to be called Cool Stack.
http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5357052&tstart=0
Will try to play with that tomorrow…
Ditched LinkSys Firmware in my WRT150n
Been fighting this cable router for a while. Symptoms were that when it gets a lot of traffic, it just stops working, requiring a reboot (unplug and plug back in). Then it is all happy again.
After playing with LinkSys support again for a few hours on the 23rd, I decided to try something new.
I actually have two routers available, I was having similar issues with my WRT-350N. So I looked up DD-WRT an alternative firmware based on Linux for my router. I found that they didn’t support the 350N so I tried it on the WRT150N instead.
Upgrading it was very simple.
- First I downloaded both the mini and generic files.
- I wrote down the NAT settings since that was the only really thing that I can’t rebuild from memory.
- I then loaded the mini firmware first.
- After I logged in again, I then loaded the generic software second.
After resetting up the NAT’s and configuring the rest of the normal configuration (like password change, administrative functions etc) it has been up and running since. Not a burp.
After I did the upgrade, I found a web page that had complete instructions for the same cable router:
URL:
DD-WRT Home page can be found:
URL:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php
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