Jan-Piet Mens

Photo: Tomas Rücker

Windows, version five point one,
Has died and gone to heaven.
I'm passing up on version six
And going straight to seven.

via.

The first four chapters of the book are sealed, and ready for printing.

Spell checking, re-reading, removing overfull hbox (you don't know what an overfull hbox is? You haven't lived! ), re-reading, etc. Then there are the diagrams: move that box left a mm, un-bold that word, align the caption, highlight the arrow. A huge amount of last-moment changes and tweaks. Nothing serious mind you, but a lot of work nevertheless.

Four chapters down. Twenty to go. And eight appendices (appendixes).

First of all, thanks to Lawrence who pointed out to me that there were links oozing out of these pages, links that I'd probably not added myself. He was right, and it should be over now.

Unfortunately, I've been ignoring software updates to this site for almost three quarters of a year now, which is why the above started happening. I've now upgraded to the latest and greatest, and hope that, apart from a few hiccups, all should be back to normal.

An der Rechtschreibung muessen wir (na ja, die Gattin — ich kann es kaum besser) noch arbeiten, aber den Ein samel dinst den meine Tochter zuhause eingerichtet hat, brachte mich zum schmunzeln.

• Cleaned up a mail queue with many thousands of messages in it, resulting from aborted ClamAV updates that "somehow" trashed their .clv files.


• Heard that a v.i.p. was given a BlackBerry device with a number that was reserved for someone else…


• Implemented a schema change on our LDAP directory, and drove that out to all thirteen servers, without a hiccup.


• Messed around with Skype,callto:// URLs and small Skype icons.


• Explained to sundry why their mails were delayed (see above).


• Explained to a mail admin what an MX is…


• And all sorts of other stuff I don't want to write about here.

What company might this ad be referring to?

The only "world-renowned" software company I know of in or around Redmond, does the "other" OS. Makes one wonder…

It is high time that I show you the table of contents for the book Alternative DNS Servers so, without further ado, here it is:

1. Introduction to the DNS


2. How to represent zone data and where to store it


3. Preparing your implementation


4. MaraDNS


5. MyDNS


6. PowerDNS Authoritative Server


7. An overview of BIND


8. BIND's Simplified Database Interface


9. Bind DLZ


10. Name Server Daemon (NSD)


11. tinydns


12. ldapdns


13. dnsmasq


14. DNS on Microsoft Windows


15. DNS and Perl


16. DNS blacklists


17. Caching name servers


18. Delegation and private DNS roots


19. Updating DNS zones and their associated records


20. The Name Service Switch


21. Internationalized Domain Names


22. Introducing DNSSEC


23. Performance


24. Securing and monitoring your DNS servers

There are also six or seven appendixes (appendices), but as we haven't yet got their position in the ToC fixed yet, I'll omit them for the time being.

Publication date for the book is rapidly approaching: the deadline is July 15th, but I see no great problem with that. The manuscript has been ready for a while, and I'm now tweaking bits here, adding an index entry (or many) there, making sure diagrams look good, cropping the width of listings so that they fit the page, etc.

This weekend I added another 7 pages of content (cool and geeky stuff), because I want to bring the book up to the round (and I think, quite impressive) number of 730 pages. (The book is bound in signatures of 32 pages, so it will have 736 pages in total.)

I'll keep you updated.