Tue, 21 Sep 2004
the hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse
Just finished this little gem by Robert Rankin. Apparently it’s hard to find in the US; I borrowed a copy from a friend. It’s a very funny, fast read. But I didn’t like the ending much; the book goes at full tilt until the end and then just sort of ends. Kind of like Neil Stephenson’s stuff in that way.
The title alone should be making you want to read it; if that doesn’t do it, the first chapter should do the trick. It’s a cross between Philip Marlow and the Muppet Show, gone horribly horribly wrong.
TTLs
The BIND master Paul Vixie gave some good advice on NANOG about default TTLs for DNS records that seemed worth remembering here.
A default TTL of 1 or 2 hours is plenty for standard internet traffic; you’ll get the caching benefit for the immediate repeat visitor, but you probably won’t see much of a caching benefit beyond that. However, you should increase the TTLs of your NS records to 2 days. This helps reduce DNS load, since your NS records are what keeps people from chasing all the way up to the root servers.
People used to throw around a week or so as a default TTL, but since it doesn’t really gain you much performance-wise there’s little reason to leave the TTL that high. It only limits your options for changing that record in case of emergency.
[/config/bind9] permanent link
Been a while
So much has been happening lately, it’s been difficult to write. Just finished moving 300 servers between colocation facilities at work. Glad that’s over and done with.
Been spending a fair amount of cycles on self-organization tactics. I think the tactics are starting to work (things like home directories in CVS, one TODO file, using iSync to manage my phone and Palm info), but the overall strategy needs some work. I’m still feeling overwhelmed.
I’d love to write about non-work related things here, but there just isn’t anything else to talk about right now. Obviously, I’ve been working too much.