Comcast vs No-Name Out-of-the-way DNS's

Comcast's name resolution services have been trouble for some time, as far as I know. What I discovered lately just goes to show how bad the problem truly is.

I use an OpenVPN connection for some business of mine. Behind that connection runs a set of DNS's used to serve both private and public IP's. So clearly we are talking a connection via an encrypted hop - not the fastest, you would think. Yet when I establish it my browsing experience goes from anemic to flawless! And mostly, I bet, this is due to the DNS being responsive - unlike the Comcast one which is so bad that sometimes even loading a fairly common, local webpage such as Boston.com can get majorly frustrating as you are waiting for it to move from one element to the next.

 I guess we need to find a way to create some real competition for these dinosaurs - or else they will probably never start feeling like they have to do any real work.

Some pracitcal uses of VPN

VPN is a term one hears often these days. However, while many people have some ideas about what it is used for - secure access, for instance - many probably lack vision of how they could benefit from its use. So for starters - what is VPN? You can use the Wiki link for a formal definition but in a less formal way one can define it as a network one can build to their own design provided one controls the server and the other machines one intends to network together have the capability to access that server via the internet.

So let us say you control a machine on the Internet with a public IP address. On it you can install a VPN server process. Then you can issue authorization to those you want to allow to join your VPN network.

Let us consider a practical example. I configure a server to serve a VPN with a private network defined as 192.168.20.0/255.255.255.0. Let us say the server gets the virtual IP address of 192.168.20.1, with the other addresses (192.168.20.2-254) available for grabs. So let us say my laptop gets an address of 192.168.20.2, my home machine gets an address of 192.168.20.5 and my office machine gets an address of 192.168.20.10.

Thus - using the same network protocols - I can collect the video feed off of my home computer to see what is going on at home, print to my office computer's printer - and do all of it from a WiFi point half the world away using my laptop.

Or - let us say - in addition to my office in Boston I decide to get one in Buenos Aires. No problem. I get another machine there - let's say, with a virtual IP address of 192.168.20.15 - and use it and the one at my office in Boston - 192.168.20.10 - to link the two networks. Now they are linked - via the internet but at the same time utilizing the VPN's security which is normally considered an unrbeakably secure way to communicate.

Those are just a couple of possible usage scenarios. I will try to cover this topic in more detail later on. For now just think of the VPN as a network you can define the way you like no matter where the computers who will join it happen to be geographically and topologically. So long as they have access to the internet and you allow them to join your VPN they can do so.

ClipGrab

Oh, how fast things change!

Just a little while ago it looked like DamnVid was all the rage - but now YouTube has changed something and it is dead in the water. However, it looks like ClipGrab is a viable alternative... for now.

DamnVid

It came time to download some videos off YouTube to migrate them from one account to another... Dont' ask me why, that doesn't really matter. So, be that as it may - it is not as easy as it may seem. The FlashPlayer used to save them in your /tmp directory on Linux - but no more. The directory recommened at the link:

.mozilla/firefox/userprofile/cache

does not seem to contain anything resembling the video files one would expect either. However, then I followed a link specified at the above to get DamnVid and this seems to be working. The video ends up right under your ~/Videos directory hierarchy.

wget and robots.txt

Well, the webmasters are trying to ward off robots... meanwhile robots are getting smarter and smarter. A natural competition, it seems.

Here's what you do to bypass the "robot police":

So what if you don't want wget to obey by the robots.txt file? You can simply add -e robots=off to the command like this:

wget -r -p -e robots=off http://www.example.com

Using wget To Download Entire Websites
courtesy Jam's Ubuntu Linux Blog.

Is Firefox too feature-rich for its own good?

I have recently been confronted with a need to integrate multimedia plugins of various kinds on our Linux boxes so that our group could have a uniform and consistent approach when it comes to multimedia. Easier said than done, I guess as if that were easy all Linux distributions would have had it in place. And some, specifically Open SuSE, leave much to be desired in that department. Others, such as Mandriva, are not bad at all, on the other hand, but it is Open SuSE we are using so it is up to me to do the multimedia integration.

Now finding various multimedia players and plugins doesn't seem like such a big deal - but getting them to work is a different story altogether. And what is puzzling me is how a browser - any browser, but I am specifically interested in Firefox as that is the one we use mostly - decides where to look for its plugins and which one to load. For example if there are two plugins available that could play a Windows Media file (let's say a MPlayer plugin and a VLC plugin) which one is the browser going to pick?

At any rate, my impression is that while Firefox is very powerful the controls and transparency necessary to configure it with ease are not there. At least not yet.

And if you know how to configure the plugins in Firefox - please email or leave a comment, help would be much appreciated.

In praise of MediaWiki

Well, something new to deal with every day... Or every week at least. The latest wonder I've come across was MediaWiki. Don't laugh - you may have had a Wiki site for years but me - up until very recently I had only been a Wiki user, not a Wiki administrator.

What can I say - this is a very nice piece of software. Installs right off the bat, easy to administer. I read the code a bit and it mostly makes sense right away too - which is, obviously, quite nice to know.

There is only one drawback that I have discovered thus far - it does not seem to be configured to search within PDF files by default, and that is exactly the functionality we need. Under Linux one has a very nice text extracftor for the purpose called pdftotext(1) that comes as part of xpdf. So technically it should not be difficult to implement this functionality under MediaWiki though I am generally somewhat reluctant to touch the code I don't own. The best I could get out of the users' forum was a suggestion to use the Lucene Search software but that looks like a whole can of worms in and of itself - and is not even guaranteed to actually do what I need done. But I guess this way or the other I will get through this one.

If any of you have any relevant experience - please advise, and your advice will as always be appreciated. But this little diffuculty notwithstanding MediaWiki really is very nice technology that does allow one to have a Wiki-style reference site up and running in under an hour.