SirSpanky.com - The Secret Diary of James Pearce Aged 20-Something

In theory, the job of a domain registrar is easy. Provide a brokering method for individuals to formally register a domain so that no one else can take it, and to provide us as the registered name owners with a way to update the necessary details (name servers etc.)

ICANN formalises the obligations of a registrar further by laying down a set of rules that a registrar must follow if they are to obtain ICANN accrediation. ICANN is basically the central domain name holder for .com domains. When a registrar isn’t accredited with ICANN, you have to wonder why not. Check out the full list of ICANN regulations and you’ll see it’s mostly common sense.

Now, GoDaddy tout themselves as being ICANN accredited. You can see that on their home page at the bottom. One of ICANN’s regulations (3.2.2) is:

3.2.2 Within five (5) business days after receiving any updates from the Registered Name Holder to the data elements listed in Subsections 3.2.1.2, 3.1.2.3, and 3.2.1.6 for any Registered Name Registrar sponsors, Registrar shall submit the updated data elements to, or shall place those elements in the Registry Database operated by the Registry Operator.

And section 3.2.1.6:

3.2.1.6 Any other data the Registry Operator requires be submitted to it.

So basically, when you sign up with GoDaddy, any information they ask us for, they must update within 5 working days of receiving an update. So I thought, no problems, I want to change the contact details, I’ll email support and get them to do it.

1. They email back giving me instructions on how to do it, even though I explicitly asked them to make the update and provided the updated details.
When I did follow their instructions, it doesn’t allow me to update the contact details because the domain contact details are through Domains By Proxy. I email them to tell them that their instructions don’t work, and request again they update the details.

2. They email me back telling me to go to the Domains By Proxy website and update my details there to disable the privacy. Now, GoDaddy is the registrar. GoDaddy holds the contact information. Why are they telling me to go to a 3rd party to update my GoDaddy registered domain details? I emailed them back citing the ICANN regulations and saying that they should do the update for me, as I am requesting it, and under ICANN regulations they need to do it within 5 working days.

3. They email back saying they have told me how to update the contact details.

Ok there’s 2 grievences I have with this. Firstly, why is their support refusing to carry out my explicit instructions period? Why do they insit on providing me with instructions to do this myself after I have asked them to do it?
Secondly, how can they call themselves an ICANN accredited registrar and refuse to update contact details for a domain registered through them?

Here’s the original transcripts for the support emails. This was actually being done on behalf of a client, so I have replaced the personal information with xxxxx’s. This is also why the emails are signed off as Peter C/O James Pearce, as the messages are basically from Peter care of myself. Also, I am still dealing with GoDaddy to resolve this!

Fw: Update [Incident ID: 4546804] - Support Question

Peter xxxxx <xxxxx@iinet.net.au>	Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 12:42 PM
To: James Pearce
—– Original Message —– From: support@godaddy.com To: xxxxx@iinet.net.au Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 8:00 PM Subject: Update [Incident ID: 4546804] - Support Question Our support staff has responded to your request, details of which are described below: Discussion Notes Support Staff Response Dear Peter xxxxx,Thank you for contacting Online Support. You can change the contact information on your domain name by following these steps. Follow the directions below to update your domain’s contact information: First, log into your account: • Go to the Go Daddy Account Login Page • Log in using your account username (which may be the same as your customer number) and password If you have trouble logging in, our password reset form may help you. You can find this form through the following link: Account Retrieval Page Once logged in, follow these steps: • Select ‘Domains’ from the ‘My Products’ menu. • Check the box next to the domain(s) you wish to modify. • Click the ‘Contact’ button from the menu above. • Make the necessary changes to each contact (click on the necessary tab to modify information). • Click on the ‘Ok’ button to save changes. Note: Changes to the settings of a domain can take an average of 48 hours due to the number of networks involved. These networks are controlled by many different entities and are updated independently. This being the case, updates to your contact information can take up to 48 hours to appear on a WHOIS listing for this domain name. Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way. Regards, Aubrey P Online Support Team Customer Inquiry Name : Peter xxxxx Phone : 61434xxxxx Domain Name : xxxxx.com Browser Info : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13I would like to change the Registrant, Administrative, Technical and Billing contacts on my xxxxx.com domain. Please change the contacts to: Name: Peter xxxxx Address: xxxxx, WA, Australia 6163 Phone: +61 434 xxxxx EMail: cs@sirtech.com.au If you need further assistance with this matter, please reply to this email or contact customer service at (480) 505-8877 and reference [Incident ID: 4546804]. Thanks, GoDaddy.com, Inc. © 2008 GoDaddy.com, Inc.. All rights reserved. Internal Virus Database is out-of-date. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.526 / Virus Database: 270.4.7/1543 - Release Date: 9/07/2008 6:32 PM

support@supportwebsite.com	Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 7:03 PM
Reply-To: support@supportwebsite.com To: james.pearce@sirtech.com.au
Our support staff has responded to your request, details of which are described below: Discussion Notes Support Staff Response Dear Peter C/O James Pearce,Thank you for contacting Online Support. According to a WhoIs search on the domain, timber-structures.com, it appears that the domain has been set with private registration. The private registration for your domain is managed through Domains By Proxy, while the domain registration is managed by us. You will need to log into your account with Domains By Proxy in order to cancel the privacy service. We have received the following instructions from Domains By Proxy for canceling private registration service for a domain: • Go to domainsbyproxy.com and click on ‘My Account’. • Log in to your Domains by Proxy account. -If you do not remember your Domains by Proxy login information, click on the ‘Forgot your password?’ link to retrieve your customer number and reset your password • Once logged in, click on ‘My Domains’. • Check the box next to the domain(s) you wish to cancel private registration for. • Click on ‘Continue’. • Confirm that you wish to cancel the registration by selecting YES. • Click the ‘Submit’ button. You will then receive an email regarding the cancellation. The domain will no longer appear in your Domains by Proxy account, and the cancellation will not affect any other services on the domain such as DNS or email. Please remember that cancellation of the private registration is not refundable. If you have any other questions regarding the cancellation of your private registration, please contact the Domains By Proxy support staff using the following URL: http://domainsbyproxy.com/Support.aspx Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way. Regards, Aubrey P Online Support Team Customer Inquiry Hi Aubrey,We followed the instructions that you set out, but the “Contact” button is greyed out when we select the timber-structures.com domain. Can you simply update the contact details on the domain for us? Thanks, Peter C/O James Pearce ———- Forwarded message ———- If you need further assistance with this matter, please reply to this email or contact customer service at (480) 505-8877 and reference [Incident ID: 4560334]. Thanks, GoDaddy.com, Inc. © 2008 GoDaddy.com, Inc.. All rights reserved.

support@supportwebsite.com <support@supportwebsite.com>	Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 10:26 PM
Reply-To: support@supportwebsite.com To: james.pearce@sirtech.com.au
Our support staff has responded to your request, details of which are described below: Discussion Notes Support Staff Response Dear Peter C/O James Pearce,As previously mentioned, the domain name has private registration on it. If you wish to make changes to the contact information on the domain name, you would need to do that through your Domains By Proxy account. I have provided a link to their help section should you need further assistance. Domains By Proxy Support Please let us know if we can help you in any other way. Sincerely, Jason P Online Support Representative Customer Inquiry Hi Aubrey,We are aware that we hold an account with Domains By Proxy. However, Domains By Proxy are not the registrar for the domain timber-structures.com, GoDaddy is. As the registrar, GoDaddy holds the contact details for said domain. As the client, we have the right to be able to update those details by notifying our registrar - GoDaddy. This is exactly what ICANN regulation 3.3.2 states (http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/ra-agreement-17may01.htm), to which GoDaddy advertises that it complies with. We don’t want to make a big deal out of this, we just want the Registrant, Administration and Technical contacts changed to: Name: James Pearce Address: 45A Collick St, Hilton, Western Australia, 6163 Phone: +61 434 353 892 EMail: cs@sirtech.com.au We would be most thankful if you could arrange for this to occur rather than requiring us to make the changes ourselves. We can provide additional account authorization access if need be. Thank You, Peter C/O James Pearce On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 7:03 PM, If you need further assistance with this matter, please reply to this email or contact customer service at (480) 505-8877 and reference [Incident ID: 4560334]. Thanks, GoDaddy.com, Inc. © 2008 GoDaddy.com, Inc.. All rights reserved.

James Pearce <james.sirtech@gmail.com>

support@supportwebsite.com <support@supportwebsite.com>	Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 4:48 AM
Reply-To: support@supportwebsite.com To: james.pearce@sirtech.com.au
Our support staff has responded to your request, details of which are described below: Discussion Notes Support Staff Response Dear Peter C/O James Pearce,Thank you for contacting online support. Unfortunately Company policy restricts Go Daddy Customer Support representatives from making changes to customer accounts or services on behalf of the customer. You will need to make this change from within your account. Sorry for any confusion. Unfortunately since the domain name has privacy registration applied to it, Domain By Proxy now holds the contact information. If at any time you cancel the privacy registration, you will be able to modify the domains contact information from GoDaddy.com’s interface. Since the domain currently has privacy registration, any contact information changes for the domain name will need to be made through Domain By Proxy’s interface. I apologize for the inconvenience. You will need to login to your Domains By Proxy account in order to make these changes or you will need to cancel the privacy services to make the changes in your GoDaddy.com account. Please use the Link provided below for further assistance with accessing your account. Domains By Proxy Support Please let us know if we are able to assist you in any other way. Regards, Mike A. Online Support Technician Customer Inquiry Hi Jason,Does this mean that GoDaddy are refusing to change the contact information as we have requested? I notice that GoDaddy keep giving us instructions to do this ourselves, but all along we have been asking GoDaddy support to make the change for us. We still want this to happen. What details do you need from us to change the Registrant, Administrative and Technical contacts on the domain? Regards, Peter C/O James Pearce On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 10:26 PM, If you need further assistance with this matter, please reply to this email or contact customer service at (480) 505-8877 and reference [Incident ID: 4560334]. Thanks, GoDaddy.com, Inc. © 2008 GoDaddy.com, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Photoshop CS2. Actually it’s a great application. But I discovered a shortcoming in it this evening when I was exporting images for a website from a PSD template that a client sent me. It’s a fixed with website, so I want to fix the width of my selection to a certain number of pixels, then adjust the height of my selection according to what I see fit. Can PS do this? Noooo. It’s just not possible. You can select normal free selection, fixed aspect ratio or fixed size. So fixed size right? Nope. You have to set the height. It’s just insane that an application we pay $400 for can’t let me fix a single dimension size. It’s not like PS is new or anything, how can this really be missing???

Then I thought, well ok, I’ll turn snap on for the selection, and just do it manually snapping to the edge. No problem for the width now. Unfortunately, it’s an image where the maximum height is near the center, so it’s hard to get the correct height. No problem, it’s a big commercial application, we should be able to just get the selection partially correct and then resize it..nope! PS will not allow this. Siiiiighh.

Gimp on OS X. So PS fails, I know Gimp can do it. Indeed, I just fix the width and continue on my merry way. Of course, I messed up the height this time as well, but I just resized the selection on the fly. Got my selection correct, and right click and copy it. Go File -> New to create a new image with it only to find that it didn’t auto size the new image for me. Well that’s useless. Then I discovered that it is possible to right click on the image and use Paste -> As New Image, which is cool, because it’s less steps to achieve the same thing. The beauty? It works

I’ve just finished compiling and installing a new FreeBSD kernel (7.0-RELEASE) on a Pentium 166Mhz. It took about 12 hours to complete. Actually, it took about 1 hour, but all the modules took 11 hours.

By default, the kernel build will compile _all_ modules. Even if, for instance, you disable FireWire in the kernel, it will still build the FireWire modules! Now, I didn’t realise this was going to happen, and I found out that you can specify what modules you want compiled to over ride this behavior. So the question became, what modules out of the available modules do I need? And the corollary of this is: What is the list of available modules for my kernel version?

I couldn’t find an answer to this anywhere on the web. All the resources I found were related to writing a kernel module, not choosing from existing modules. Anyway, I dived into the directory of the kernel source, and it’s actually all there.

/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/modules

And each directory is a module. There’s a lot of sub files that show up in the compilation of the kernel, but that’s basically all the modules. So save yourself about 90% compilation time, and use the /etc/make.conf to over ride the modules that get built!

The actual procedure for compiling the kernel is in the FreeBSD Handbook.

This configuration DOES work. I’m using it in my testing environment right now just to make sure the caching doesn’t interfere with my production software, but the application itself is fine.

One note though, the control panel that is distributed with eAccelerator will not work with this configuration. The reason is that the basic authentication via the PHP headers that the file uses does not work when PHP is a CGI. It only works when PHP is an Apache module.

A quick hack I made is to use a simple session key instead. This is a straight dump from vi with the line numbers on, from the eAccelerator 0.9.5.2 control.php file:
31 /* {{{ auth */

32 /*if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']) || !isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']) ||

33 $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] != $user || $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] != $pw) {

34 header(’WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm=”eAccelerator control panel”‘);

35 header(’HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized’);

36 exit;

37 }*/

38 /* }}} */

39 if( $_SESSION['xxx']!=$mykey ) {

40 if( ($_POST['user']!=$user) && ($_POST['pass']!=$pw) ) {

41 ?>

42 <form name=”basicauth” method=”post”>

43 <input name=”user” type=”text”>

44 <input name=”pass” type=”text”>

45 <input type=”submit”>

46 </form>

47 48 exit;

49 } else {

50 session_start();

51 $_SESSION['xxx'] = $mykey;

52 }

53 }

You can see I’ve commented out the original auth. I haven’t even bothered labeling the form fields here. The form will automatically submit back to the page it is on. The session key is protected by you setting the key value and the key value. It works quite well for a 5 minute hack.

I’ve been investigating FreeBSD as an alternative to Debian on some of my systems. I used it a couple of years ago, in version 5, and it was nice. Performance wasn’t an issue back then though, it was more of a case of getting applications installed an configured. Because I was happy with Debian and had no complaints, I really didn’t have any reason to shift. With Splunk eating my low end hardware though, I thought this would be a good oppurtunity.

There’s many forum threads out there dealing with the issue of Linux vs. FreeBSD, so I’m not going to cover the issues here. In these open source forums though, it’s cautionable to make sure you have the latest information. Many forum threads on this issue cite the bad SMP support / performance in FreeBSD when compared with Linux. Well that’s just hogwash since version 7. I found a really nice web article dealing with a comparison of BSD variants, and one of the issues it covers is the SMP performance of FreeBSD 7. I thought it would make a good graph to post

As you can see though, FreeBSD 7 certainly scales with SMP quite well.

Ok since I have started getting used to Splunk and finding how much easier it is than cat /var/log/mail.log | grep ‘user@domain’, I added the rest of my logging to it. This amounts to about 80M / day. Firstly, because I use SSHFS a lot, Splunk killed the CPU when it was indexing - the CPU was a K6-2 333. I overclocked it to 343, which ultimately did not help

I think the CPU might have been “ok” bu t I swapped it for a K6-3 400 anyway, which I’ve had no problems with. The bigger problem was the fact that during indexing, Splunk ate my RAM. 384M. I woke up to a hard disk thrashing at 60 pages / sec. The box didn’t crash though, Linux did it’s due diligence and started purging processes

Anyway I’ve now increased the memory to 586 (512 + 64), and Splunk is fine. No problems at all. Load seems to top out at about 3 which is nice. No swapping. I will mention that the same box is also running a MySQL server, LDAP and DNS Masq. Those services don’t eat CPU or much RAM because they are not normally used, but it is nice to be able to access them rather than to find they’ve been killed to make room for Splunk.

Conclusion: Splunk WILL run with less than the 1G “minimum” RAM that Splunk say in the system requirements documentation…but if you go below 512M, you’re gonna swap. And 1.4Ghz minimum CPU well…f3ar my K6-3

Because my directory server is running on quite old hardware (K6-2, 256M RAM), and it is faily loaded already, I wondered if changing the MTA might help. I use Debian, and I’ve never changed the MTA on it, so it currently has Exim.

The system doesn’t process much mail, mainly just local mail and spam, so I’m not conerned about scalability. I did some digging on Google, and found a great comparison between Unix MTA’s. It might for an enlightening read. I also found a forum thread talking about the scalablity of Exim, and I have to say that guy has a sweet server setup, with his MTA’s PXE booting and installing automagically…it’s just like Active Directory!

Anyway back to it. I couldn’t find any conclusive measurements, or even vague measurements, of the resource usage between the two programs. I happen to have another server that doesn’t process any mail and runs Postfix, so I thought I’d just take a peek at the memory usage of the two. It looks like Postfix runs separate programs for the queue management and the program itself, and it weighs in at about 2.5MB of memory. Exim has a single process and weighs in at about 450k.

Quite a difference. There wasn’t much point in looking at the CPU load - it’s 0 because neither of them are processing any mail

I think I’ll stick with Exim on my directory server though. Lower memory footprint = better at the moment.