y.st./source/pages/en/weblog/2015/12-December/11.xhtml

<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'title' => '<code>//test.</code> and <code>//10.in-addr.arpa.</code>',
	'body' => <<<END
<p>
	I received a response about transferring credits, but I the person I wrote to misunderstood.
	She said that I needed to contact my old school and ask them which credits I can transfer.
	She had misunderstood which direction I was trying to transfer my credits.
	I wrote back to clarify, and she understood the second time.
	She said that all credits could be transferred in, but that was possible that only some would count toward a degree at the school that she represents.
	I asked how to tell how many credits were usable and how many courses I would need to complete my degree, so directed me to a third person.
	She only gave me a telephone number for third person, so I explained that I do not have a telephone and asked how to reach him by email.
	It seems that he is not reachable by email though, so she gave me the email address of yet a fourth person with which to make an appointment to come in in person.
</p>
<p>
	I updated the weblog index-building script.
	Not only does it now take care of the main, multi-year spanning index, it also includes the year on the $a[ASCII] calendars to make navigating the new main index easier.
</p>
<p>
	I think that I have come up with the format that I want to use for resolved $a[rDNS] host names on my local network.
	My main goal is to learn how to run a $a[DNS] server for both forward and backward name resolution, but as a secondary goal, I want to set up a clean structure that will make it easier to manage the Wi-Fi router&apos;s whitelist.
	By combining the whitelist feature and the router&apos;s static $a[DHCP] allocation option, I can assign permanent $a[IP] addresses to any host that I allow on the network.
	I can then use $a[rDNS] resolution to find out what device has a given $a[IP] address and who that device belongs to, making it easier to find out which devices are no longer around and should be removed from the whitelist.
	The format that I currently want to use for $a[rDNS] return values is &quot;{device name}.{owner name}.[no-mdns.]in-addr.test.&quot; If I know that, for example, Vanessa only has her laptop and there are three devices associated with her, I can remove the other two from the whitelist and $a[DNS] server.
	Likewise, if I see a device that I do not recognize on the whitelist, I can check to see who owns or owned it.
	The <code>no-mdns</code> segment is just a flag to myself.
	I doubt that it will come in handy, but any host that does not answer to a <code>//local.</code> domain will be given this designation.
</p>
<p>
	Quite a while ago, I set our Wi-Fi router to reserve the shortest nine available local $a[IP] addresses for my personal use.
	I wanted to be able to assign these $a[IP] addresses to my machines so that the router&apos;s $a[DHCP] server would always assign my machines the same addresses and I could find them accross the network when I needed them.
	This was before I learned that $a[mDNS] was being used by all of my machines and that I did not need static $a[IP] addresses for any machine that I was not port forwarding to.
	$a[rDNS] is pretty meaningless without static $a[IP] addresses though, so because all $a[IP] addresses will now be static, reserving the short addresses for static use is pointless.
	Instead, I am now reserving the larger address range from <code>10.0.0.1</code> to <code>10.0.0.99</code> for use by any machine that answers to an $a[mDNS] domain.
	Any that do not will instead be assigned an $a[IP] address with three digits in its least-significant segment.
	I have also reallocated <a href="/en/domains/chicken.local.xhtml"><code>chicken</code></a>&apos;s and <a href="/en/domains/thinkpad-x60s.local.xhtml"><code>thinkpad-x60s</code></a>&apos;s $a[IP] addresses (<code>10.0.0.1</code> and <code>10.0.0.2</code>, respectively) to Vanessa&apos;s and Cyrus&apos; machines.
	Cleaning out the old whitelist meant removing machines that were no longer in use on the network.
</p>
<p>
	I found a <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BIND9ServerHowto">guide to configuring Bind9</a> and used it to set up zones for both the <a href="/en/domains/test.xhtml"><code>//test.</code></a> and <a href="/en/domains/10.in-addr.arpa.xhtml"><code>//10.in-addr.arpa.</code></a> name spaces.
	At first, only the <code>//test.</code> zone functioned.
	I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what was wrong with the <code>//10.in-addr.arpa.</code> zone file, but it turned out that there was nothing wrong with that file itself.
	Instead, the problem was in the configuration file that told Bind9 where to even locate the file.
</p>
<p>
	I received a letter written in Arabic from a company today.
	It seems that someone once again used one of my email addresses to register an account.
	Luckily, the email contained instructions for having that account deleted, though on second thought, I should have just sent a password reset request and added the account to my collection of accounts that people gave me by using my email address to register instead of their own.
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
END
);