JUNOS DHCPv6 DNS Search List

DNS, is it me?, technology

I have been looking at the DHCPv6 server in JUNOS 15.1X49-D160.2. It is easy enough to setup Note: Step 5 is wrong, the first two instructions should have dhcpv6 as the last argument e.g.

set security zones security-zone untrust interfaces ge-0/0/0.0 host-inbound-traffic system-services dhcpv6

It would be nice to configure the DNS Search List option. The option code for this is 24. So I tried this

set access address-assignment pool my-pool family inet6 dhcp-attributes option 24 array string [ "sinodun.com" "ipv4.sinodun.com" ]

but it didn’t work. There appears to be no examples of how to do this correctly so after reading RFC3315 section 8 and RFC1035 section 3.1 I realised it had to be in uncompressed wire format like this

set access address-assignment pool my-pool family inet6 dhcp-attributes option 24 array hex-string [ "0773696e6f64756e03636f6d00" "04697076340773696e6f64756e03636f6d00" ]

which IMHO is not the easiest way to configure things.

Flush DNS cache on Ubuntu

is it me?, linux

This weekend I came across several pages on the web suggesting ways to flush the DNS cache on Ubuntu. I will not point to the offending pages here but they are easy to find with Google. Most of them are wrong in several ways.

  1. Ubuntu doesn’t install a DNS cache by default
  2. Most of the pages say something along the lines of to flush the DNS cache you need to restart the nscd deamon.
  3. See 1
  4. As a result of 1 – They tell you to install nscd so that you can then restart nscd!
  5. I redirect your attention to issue 1.

If you really want a local cache then I would suggest installing unbound which will work better and give you DNSSEC as well.

Netgear ReadyNAS Pro

is it me?, OS X, technology

I bought one of these because I keep running out of disk space. With the ability to store 12Tb, I thought it might keep me going for some time to come.

It allows you to build raid 0,1 and 5 arrays and Netgear’s own X raid something or other. Unfortunately, it doent allow striping and mirroring. It  is compatible with OS X and supports AFP shares and Timemachine as well as iscsi as I mentioned earlier. However, the GUI is a bit flaky and didn’t seem to like Initiator iqn’s at all. If you download the root ssh plugin you can access the box as root over ssh and look at what it is actually doing.

iscsi config is held in /etc/ietd.conf

Target iqn.2010-2.taurus.sinodun.com:calendarserver
 Lun 0 Path=/e/calendarserver,Type=fileio,ScsiSN=RN293R60037B-003,IOMode=wb
 HeaderDigest CRC32,None
 DataDigest CRC32,None
 IncomingUser user xxxxxxxxxxxx
 InitiatorIQN iqn.2010-02.com.sinodun.hydra:calendarserver

Target iqn.2010-2.taurus.sinodun.com:collaboration
 Lun 0 Path=/e/collaboration,Type=fileio,ScsiSN=RN293R60037B-001,IOMode=wb
 HeaderDigest CRC32,None
 DataDigest CRC32,None
 IncomingUser user xxxxxxxxxxxx
 InitiatorIQN iqn.2010-02.com.sinodun.hydra:collaboration

Firstly their Target IQNs don’t look like the spec described on wikipedia – I don’t know if it is Netgear or Wikipedia that is wrong here and don’t care as this doen’t seem to break anything.

The real problem in the Initiator IQN – I had to add this by hand and it gets stripped out of every entry in the file every time a new iscsi target is created and at other random times. According to the Netgear web GUI theses are needed for persistent reservation support.

However, once it is working it seems nice and stable. If your disks don’t mount just go and check those Initiator IQNs.

log(0.5) and the OS X calculator

4 Commentsis it me?, OS X

The OS X calculator is one of my favorite applications and I use it every day for work (I find  the binary display in the programmer view especially useful). So I was very surprised when I noticed that it was giving me the wrong answer for log(0.5). I was getting log(0.5) = 0.301 when it should be -0.301. Strangely 1-log(0.5) was correctly shown as 1.301. Well today I discovered that this only happens if you enable “Show Separators” in  the View menu.

Does anyone else see this or is it just me?