New Deadwood snapshot: Non-A records now resolve

I guess not that many people are testing Deadwood.

Let me be honest about the type of testing I’m doing with Deadwood: I am testing Deadwood’s as a DNS server used for casual web surfing on today’s internet. That means that most of the queries done are A queries; I don’t do much testing with AAAA (IPv6) queries because, quite bluntly, my ISP doesn’t offer IPv6 service and I can think of only one site on the Internet with an AAAA record: ipv6.google.com.

Likewise, I haven’t done any testing with MX records. I haven’t touched MX records at all because I’m not using Deadwood with a mail hub. So, it came as an unpleasant shock to me when I discovered last night that Deadwood hasn’t been properly resolving MX records for over a year.

In Deadwood 2.4.05 (released August 9, 2009), I added the ability to rotate resource records. Unknown to me, this feature broke Deadwood with any variable-length record, such as a MX record pair where the hostnames are of different lengths.

The advantage of using Deadwood’s robust string library with almost all of Deadwood’s DNS processing is that this bug did not result in any memory corruption or cause any other problems; the only issue has been that Deadwood would not resolve MX or other variable length records.

The idea that some freetards advocate that open source software is magically tested and that all bugs become shallow is nothing more than so much—how should I say this—mental masturbation. The author of Mailman, John Viega, points out how wrong this is in his excellent essay “The Myth of Open Source Security”.

Excuse me for the blunt wording, but I am a little frustrated right now: I have devoted a decade of my life to MaraDNS, and I haven’t even been able to get a job because of my hard work; while I have had a couple of interviews I would not have had because of MaraDNS, so far I have gotten no offers. Yes, those are interviews I would not had have if it weren’t for MaraDNS, and, yes, MaraDNS kept my skills from getting completely rusty during the ’00s when I was concentrating on learning Spanish and living in Mexico. But, looking back, I really wish I had spent more time learning C++ and object oriented programming and less time editing the Wikipedia or posting to /..

It looks like Deadwood isn’t getting much external testing; not one person saw Deadwood’s issue with MX records in the year Deadwood has had this bug. So, yeah, like everything else with MaraDNS, I’m responsible for just about all of the testing. This isn’t a complete loss; people have asked me in interviews about my testing methodology for MaraDNS.

I have just uploaded a snapshot which fixes the issue with rotating records like MX records:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

As a side benefit, since I have fixed this issue, TTL aging and RR rotation now work with ANY records.

Next: Set up a test for this issue, as well as DNS compression tests for all of the resource record types MaraDNS supports. If I get time, I will also set up tests to make sure Deadwood correctly handles things like SRV records with compression pointers, and that Deadwood doesn’t compress SRV records.

Deadwood 2.9.04 released

I have released Deadwood today. This is the recursive resolver that I recommend all MaraDNS and Deadwood users use unless they have a compelling reason to use an older release of a recursive resolver; all other MaraDNS recursive code will now only be updated to address critical security problems. For example, if MaraDNS 1.0’s resolver stops being able to resolve www.google.com or www.microsoft.com tomorrow, I will not update it; I will tell people to update to Deadwood.

That said, this is still a beta-test release of Deadwood. The code has only been beta-tested for under a month and I want to get two full months of beta testing before declaring it stable. I really appreciate all of the bugs and issues Sebastian Müller has reported and hope other people also test this software and report issues.

It may seem unusual that I am not fixing bugs with the stable 1.0 recursive resolver while the Deadwood (MaraDNS 2.0) recursive resolver is only undergoing beta-testing. This isn’t entirely true; if someone reports a bug with MataDNS 1.0’s recursive resolver and wants it fixed, I will fix it. For a price. My business model with MaraDNS is to use the program as my resume (since I was having fun in Mexico during the first decade of the 2000s, it’s how I have been keeping my computer skills up to date), as well as accepting donations and selling service and support. [1]

Right now, the kinds of bugs I want people to look for and report in Deadwood are host names that do not resolve. If there is a host out there that correctly resolves in BIND or whatever, but doesn’t resolve in Deadwood, I want to know about it. I also want to know about any memory leaks people find in Deadwood. I welcome reports of crashes, but only if accompanied by a stack trace or recipe to reproduce the crash (ideally both). Valgrind errors are OK to report, but only if Deadwood is compiled with “VALGRIND_NOERRORS” defined (export FLAGS='-g -DVALGRIND_NOERRORS' ; make from the src/ directory of Deadwood). I would love people to test IPv6 compatibility with Deadwood; the SQA regressions tell me Deadwood works with IPv6, but I would love reports from users on IPv6 networks to see if they are any real-world problems with it (IPv6 needs to be explicitly enabled when compiling Deadwood: export FLAGS='-O3 -DIPV6' ; make ).

Deadwood 2.9.04 can be downloaded here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/testing/

[1] I find it incredibly naive when people tell me I work on MaraDNS because I want to tweak things or what not. No, sorry freetards, the amount of work I do on MaraDNS is far greater than tweaking around and installing a new Linux distribution or compiling a program with different optimization flags. The reason I worked so hard on MaraDNS is because I wanted to make my mark on the world, have my Wikipedia page. I did that. And it was a nice way for me to pass the time during slower moments in Mexico when there weren’t girls around to flirt with. But, now I’m married and I need to think about the bottom line. Amazing how a wife changes my priorities.

New Deadwood snapshot: neustar.biz fixed

While doing my own “dogfood” testing for Deadwood, I discovered that the host name “neustar.biz” did not resolve. The issue was that I never bothered to make DNS queries case-insensitive.

The solution is to convert all DNS queries in to their lower-case form before looking them up in the cache or sending another query out to resolve a glueless NS/incomplete CNAME (in the case of “neustar.biz”, the issue was that the CNAMEs were in upper case). In addition, since there may very well be some stub resolvers out there that won’t accept an answer unless it’s in the same case as the question, I now have Deadwood preserve the case in the original form of the query to give back to the stub resolver, using a variable called “orig_query”.

It can be downloaded here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

The patch can also be looked at.

I can see the program is getting some attention by the number of clueless emails I am getting asking for private Deadwood support. It would be nice if these people would pay me once I give them the usual form reply asking for money. That has not happened; people who do not have enough courtesy to heed multiple disclosures that email is only for paying customers are not courteous enough to decide to pay for support. It’s a form of the internet dork rule: The anonymity of the internet coupled with the ease of getting on a soapbox attracts all kinds of unpleasant people; the corollary to this rule is that any unmoderated forum is soon overrun by unpleasant people, since anyone who doesn’t want to waste time getting in to a flame war is soon chased away by the trolls and flamers.

Hopefully this attention will soon translate in to a job with a living wage. Things are tough in this economy, and looking for work is sometimes very frustrating. The only serious interest I have gotten is from people who know about MaraDNS or from connections. Simply putting my resume out there on Monster or Dice so far hasn’t resulted in anything.

Some thoughts on Rijndael

When I heard that the Rijndael block cipher was selected as the algorithm for the Advanced encryption standard, I was so excited I sent one of the creators of Rijndael a very excited email.

OK, I should probably explain this in more layman’s terms. AES—the advanced encryption standard—is the standard cipher people use when people get a clue and realize they need to use strong cryptography and not ad-hoc schemes to protect data. WEP used RC4 instead of AES, and was soon broken; this has been replaced by WPA2, which does use AES. Indeed, the wireless packets being sent to publish this blog are encrypted with AES. The blu ray discs sitting on the player in the other room are encrypted with AES (this is another form of cluelessness, since cryptography only makes it inconvenient, not computationally infeasible, for the intended user of a piece of media to copy said media. The way you stop piracy is by teaching freetards integrity and morals, not with cryptographic ideas that will never work). AES is the most secure way to make web sites encrypted with https.

I liked Rijndael more than the other contestants because it was a good deal more flexible. Rijndael was designed with something called the wide trail strategy that allows components to be readily replaced or modified. For example, it is possible to change its block size; all other AES candidates (with the exception of HPC and possibly RC6) had a fixed block size of 128 bits; Rijndael can have a block size of 128, 160, 192, 224, or 256 bits. Or, if desired, it is relatively straightforward to make an unofficial Rijndael variant with a 32, 64, or 96 bit block size.

It is also possible to change its S-box if one feels Rijndael is somehow too algebraic.

Another thing that is possible to do is to make a Rijndael variant using 64-bit instead of 32-bit integers. If this is done, the variant’s “natural” block size is 512 bits; this can be adapted to have a block size of any multiple of 64 bits from 64 to 1024 bits (64, 128, 192, 256, 320, 384, 448, 512, 576, 640, 704, 768, 832, 896, 960, or 1024 bits). The dirty work of coming up with magic constants for a 64-bit Rijndael variant has already been done with the Whirlpool hash; the only constants we need to pull out of the air are the “shift row” constants.

The Rijndael/Whirlpool variant with a 1024-bit block size has a large enough block to be used in a “sponge function” mode of operation. A cryptographic sponge allows any significantly large random-looking permutation to be used as the code of a hash function or stream cipher (it’s a hash function with an arbitrarily long output). We can use a 1024-bit block size cipher as a sponge to generate a 256-bit hash, or by having things be twice as slow, a 384-bit hash (For people familiar with sponge constructions: The 256-bit hash is done with a “capacity” and “rate” of 512 bits; the 384-bit hash is done with a “capacity” of 768 bits and a “rate” of 256 bits).

Another idea that has been implemented is both 64-bit and 128-bit Rijndael variants where the encryption and decryption operations are identical—useful for minimizing code size in implementations where encryption and decryption are both supported. We give up block size flexibility when we do this (the 32-bit version needs a block size of 128 bits, but the 64-bit version can have a block size of either 64 bits or 512 bits). This has been implemented with Anubis (32-bit words, 128-bit block size) and Khazad (64-bit words, 64-bit block size; can be modified to be a 512-bit block). In addition, there is a proposed 128-bit word size primitive (PDF file) that could be used to make either a 128-bit or 2048-bit Rijndael variant using the same operations for encryption and decryption.

Rijndael has a couple of issues. One is that the key schedule is not as strong as it could be; this has resulted in their being an academic weakness called a “related key attack”. This does not result in any practical security problems; a related key attack is one of the hardest to utilize in the real world (cipher keys are usually hashed using cryptographic hashes). Indeed, the website describing this attack on Rijndael uses, of all things, Rijndael to encrypt traffic.

The other issue is that in an optimized implementation, Rijndael uses a lot of table lookups, which make it vulnerable to an attack called a “cache timing attack”. A cache timing attack could be used by an adversary with limited access to a system running Rijndael encryptions to determine a Rijndael key used elsewhere on the system. The attack is right now a purely academic attack; no one has seen it used by a real-world adversary, and some processors (such as the ARM) series can thwart it with cache lock-down. With the AES instruction set now a reality, these attacks will soon be a non-issue.

So, yes, Rijndael is a very nice, very flexible cryptographic primitive.

I am getting sponsorship for MaraDNS

I am letting people know that I am now getting regular sponsorship for MaraDNS. This means that, as long as the sponsorship continues, I will, contrary to the roadmap I placed in this blog entry, add new features to MaraDNS (as I said when I clarified my MaraDNS roadmap).

That’s the good news.

The bad news for the freetards is that the features I will add will be the features my sponsor wants me to add. They are not the features you want to add to MaraDNS—unless you’re willing to also sponsor MaraDNS.

New MaraDNS snapshot

Since some freetard thinks a "security report" which they can send me in private email is a report of a segfault, without doing any due diligence whatsoever to see if the issue in question can be exploited, I have updated my mailme.php to point out it's not a security report unless you have "done due diligence to determine how the security bug you think you found can reasonably be exploited".

I have replied to this twit with my "pay me for support or I'll forward your email to the list" form reply, but have also fixed the segfault in question. This is a segfault; it's not a security problem because a NULL pointer dereference can only be exploited in the kernel, not in userland (where the kernel promptly terminates the process). The fix can be downloaded here:

http://maradns.org/download/1.4/snap/201001

I wonder what idiotic excuse freetards will use to email me asking me for support next. Having the "I'll make your email public if you reply" note at least stops them from replying to my "pay me for support or take it to the list" form reply with some idiotic "But I'm entitled to free support!" reply.

And, yes, I have no problem with people sending me these kinds of reports to the mailing list.

Cool blog on the problems of freetards

There is a cool blog entry on the problems of the attitudes freetards have, and the issues with “free content”. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the new economy hasn’t changed that.

People who think open-source software (OSS) makes it possible for all content to be free don’t understand how OSS changes the relationship between the developer and the user. A lot of people think an OSS program is like a commercial program, but free, and that they can ask for features or get support for free, and it gets pretty tiring to have people email me asking for free support, even though I make it clear that I don't provide free email support for my program.

The thinking behind OSS is that I donate some of my coding time and effort to the greater community. In return, people are free to contribute bug fixes or improvements to the program, or supply support on the mailing list. For example, someone wanted better IPv6 support, supplied patches, and now MaraDNS has good IPv6 support. Another person wanted better Windows service support, and supplied patches to make MaraDNS’ new recursive core be a full Windows service. Other people answer user's questions on the mailing list or translate documentation. Webconquest very generously provides me a free Linux shell account and hosting for the web site.

Likewise, I found an OSS Doom random generator I liked and provided bug fixes and improvements to it; when I lost interest in it, another person became the maintainer and improvements continue to be made even though I no longer work on that code. And, there is a Free Windows Civilization clone for Windows which I have provided a bug fix and extended the documentation with.

OSS doesn’t mean we have the right to demand all content be free or that we are justified in pirating media and software. OSS means that we can, together, make free content which complements the for-pay content out there.

Deadwood support clarification

OK, it finally happened: Someone emailed me with a Deadwood support concern. So, I have just updated the Deadwood page and the page with my email address to clarify the following (which is in Deadwood's INSTALL.txt):

The channels of support for Deadwood are the same as for MaraDNS: Post it to the MaraDNS mailing list or pay me for support via email. Details are at http://www.maradns.org.

Sorry, guys. I'm not being paid for my time writing these programs, yet give these programs away free of charge with very liberal (BSD) licensing terms. I used to provide free MaraDNS email support, but this no longer became practical about two years ago; the backlog became too big for me to answer in a timely manner. Please either pay me or use the mailing list if you need support. Ditto with blog comments; please don't ask questions on the blog; the place for free support is the MaraDNS list.

Rant: Using open source to justify piracy

This last weekend, Slashdot had yet another idiotic since open source software exists, it's OK to be a pirate thread.

This type of freetard thinking annoys me greatly. The thinking amounts to this:

• Artists, movie makers, musicians, and other generators of intellectual property have an inherit desire to generate these things
• These people don't care if they are paid or not
• Therefore, all media should be free and there should be no intellectual property

This completely ignores the obvious truth that artists, movie producers, musicians, software developers, and other creators of intellectual property, do indeed care whether or not they get paid.

Freetards with this thinking look at the free software movement to justify this asinine thinking. More annoyingly, many of these freetards think they can have the same customer-provider relationship with a free software developer that they have with a piece of commercial software paid for.

People with this thinking generally do not understand the collaborative nature of open source development. They think, in so many words "I want you to work hard making this and am unwilling to pay your nor to lift one finger helping you". They do not understand that, if they want better documentation for a program, they can write it themselves. If they want better artwork for an open-source video game, they can draw it themselves. If they want to see a feature implemented, they can implement it themselves.

They think they can just demand that the developer/artists/whoever do this work for them "for fun and for free".

This is the thinking of a small extremist minority; the internet allows all sorts of wild and fringe theories to be propagated and supported in online bulletin boards.

Desert Island future plans

Right now, I have the following games on my Desert Island CD:

• The excellent C-evo
• David Teach's Gin Rummy
• A tiny version of Zillions of Games
• Cultivation
• Andy Noble's take on Tetris and a 1980s video game called "Manic Miner"

Of these six games, I am going to delete two for the next Desert Island release: Cultivation and Manic Miner.

Cultivation doesn't have compelling graphics, IMO, and its gameplay is a bit far-fetched for my tastes.

Manic Miner's problem is that it's a faithful copy of the original 1983 game, and like the original game, it's, as TVTropes calls it, "Nintendo Hard". After struggling for an hour, I was able to get past the first screen, and even on to the third screen, but there's no way to save the game so I have to go back to the first screen every time I start the game up.

There is supposedly a cheat code for it (802926) which lets one jump past levels, but it doesn't work. So, out it goes. Andy's take on Tetris is nice (and my fiancée likes it), but I'm ditching his take on Manic Miner (which, yes, is faithful to the 1983 game, but we've moved beyond that).

There's a couple of other takes on Manic Miner for the PC out there but I don't like either of them either -- one of them has the audacity to ask for a shareware registration fee for the game. As a programmer who despises freetards myself, I agree people should get compensated for their work, but when original Manic miner creator Matthew Smith flat out says "if they are making money then I want my share", I don't feel it's ethical to make a shareware Manic Miner without giving Matt his cut.

So, deleting all this leaves me about 850k to play with. 150k or so of that will be some C-evo stuff (my HOWTO, a couple of small programs to mod C-evo's gameplay, a diagram of the tech tree, and slightly modified Mongol nation graphics); that leaves me with about 700k. Some of that will become wedding photos once I marry my fiancée January sometime; but I need to find one or two more really tiny games with compelling gameplay that doesn't quickly get stale.

Some ideas:

• An emulator and some old video games. My biggest issue here is finding games the creators don't mind having available on the Internet
• Win Frotz (under 200k) and a few text adventure games. The issue here is that these kinds of games have no replay value.

Does anyone else know of any good tiny video games for Windows? Replay value is important.

Clarification about MaraDNS roadmap

Since some anonymous freetard responded to my last blog entry by trying to put some BS on the MaraDNS Wikipedia entry, let me clarify my roadmap:

• I have no plans to quit working on MaraDNS. “Quit working” implies I will no longer fix bugs or answer email on the list. This is false.
• My current plan is to continue to fix bugs after the 2.0 release of MaraDNS. I plan on continuing to fix bugs in 2.0 and the upcoming 1.4 release of MaraDNS for the foreseeable future.
• I will continue to monitor the mailing list and answer questions I deem appropriate to answer.
• I will still provide for-pay private email support for MaraDNS
• I will still add features to MaraDNS that people are willing to sponsor

Now, let me give you guys a rant about freetards. A freetard is someone who expects something for nothing. They feel they have an entitled right to download pirated software and media, and that companies who try to protect their intellectual property are somehow in the wrong (or that intellectual property should not exist). They feel they are entitled to free private email MaraDNS support (I get about one idiot like this a month) even though I make it clear I don’t provide this kind of support. They feel I should spend my free time writing MaraDNS “for fun and for free” and try to put untrue negative statements about MaraDNS on the Wikipedia if I don’t give them something they think they are entitled to.

One of the biggest hassles developing MaraDNS is the number of freetards out there. People who don’t lift a finger to help make MaraDNS a better server, but expect me to waste time answering their email asking for the same feature 10 other freetards have already asked for. People whose net contribution to MaraDNS has been to annoy me.

About a month ago, I had an interesting discussion on Slashdot about user’s expectations for open-source software. The conclusion: Many users of open-source software expect to be treated like customers, but are unwilling to pay a single dime for open-source software.

Bottom line: If you want to be treated like a customer of MaraDNS, you first must become a customer of MaraDNS. If you make a modest donation to MaraDNS, I will be happy to answer your email; the charge, for the record, is US $50 per private email support incident, more if I need to add a feature to MaraDNS to resolve your concern.

If you want to be a freetard and send me a private email, I’ll spend about 10 seconds scanning your email to make sure you didn’t make a donation, then send you the “Show me the money” form reply. Yes, this includes bug reports. Yes, this includes feature requests. Yes, this includes whatever discussion you want to have with me about MaraDNS in private email. All of this belongs on the list, not in my personal mailbox—unless you include a check in your email.

An open source developer grows up

A lot of open-source forums are full of naive and innocent people. People who honestly believe that software can be developed and media can be made by nothing more than people working for fun and for free in their free time. Indeed, people point to Linux and say "Look! This great software project made for fun and for free!"

That's not how software development works. Linux? It's very disorganized; there is no central authority to standardize on things like the Desktop interface to use, the ABI for drivers, and what not. This results in Linux being a mess: A hodge-podge of driver ABIs (sound is so bas that it's nay-to-unusable in Linux), desktop GUI interfaces (Qt, GTK, FLTK, Xaw, TCL/TK, Motif and its Lesstif clone, to name just a very few), programs at various stages of development, etc. The only thing Linux can seem to agree on at all is POSIX, which is so old and quaint, the only networking protocol it talks about is UUCP [1].

Linux makes a very good server OS for someone who knows what they are doing, but it is not and never will be an end-user desktop.

For example, the Linux sound system. What happened was that the main developer for Linux's sound system one day grew up and realized that the work needed to make open-source software compared to the reward he was getting was just not worth it. So he tried to make it commercial; other Linux kernel developers wanted to keep everything open source, so they threw out all of his work (never mind that his system was the standard system for doing sound with Linux for years) and reimplemented it, more poorly. Linux's sound is a mess to this very day, with dozens of half-baked audio systems in place, none of which works as good as the original system.

OK, let me go back to why this happened: The main developer grew up. He realized that open source software development for fun and for free is plain simply not worth it. He left the project. No other Linux developer was able to make the same quality of code he did.

Another example: Xconq, which I talked about in this blog posting. Summary: The principal author, after nearly two decades of work on the project on and off, finally lost interest in the project and development just came to a halt without any formal announcement. Many open source projects die like this; the developer loses interest, but never puts closure on the project. Instead of giving the project a proper burial, the project becomes a zombie, dead but pretending to be alive.

Another example: FVWM. Rob Nation realized one day that it was a far more productive use of his time to be with his wife and kids than to work on open-source software, so he stopped FVWM development. He handed over maintenance to other people who, IMHO, did not do as good of a job as Rob Nation developing the software; while FVWM2 has more features than FVWM1, the code is more unstable and more bloated. Indeed, I still use the last release of Rob Nation's FVWM1 today when I'm using Linux. FVWM1 ended with proper closure; FVWM2's development has slowed down but still appears to be actively development (albeit at a glacial pace); the last stable release was done in 2006, but a beta release was done as recently as last month.

Another example: People's Tactics. The developer made a free beer "grogger" wargame for Windows that simulates the old 1970s and 1980s wargames groggers played with hex maps and a zillion tiles on the maps (Squad Leader and other games from Avalon Hill, SPI, Axis & Allies which didn't use hexes but was probably the most popular wargame of this type, etc.) He realized that he should be paid for his work (software development, support, etc.), so removed the website for his older free game, and replaced it with a website for his for-pay Advanced Tactics game.

And, yes, I'm coming to the realization I need to put closure on MaraDNS. This means my next release of MaraDNS (MaraDNS 2.0) will be my last release of MaraDNS. MaraDNS 2.0 will have real Windows service support for the recursive code, in addition to a rewritten thread-free recursive core. I've done about two thirds of this work on and off for two years; I made a lot of progress in late 2007, and even more progress in the first two thirds of 2009, but come September I hit a roadblock when I hit the point of starting to implement full recursion. I have made some progress chipping away at that roadblock, but it's slow progress.

I also hit a point where I realized it is more fun to do things like research Chess variants that no one plays (openings, best opening setup, midgame strategy, etc.) than to finish up my DNS server. Indeed, I feel this software is holding me back; it's written in C (which is next-to-useless on a resume unless you also have C++ or Objective C; come to think of it, with all the companies outsourcing development to India, C development in any form might be useless at this point) in a day and age when the buzzwords people look for on resumes are things like "Java", ".net framework", "PHP", and "SharePoint".

I have been spending my time working on MaraDNS instead of getting my resume out there (it's pretty discouraging in this economy, but I shouldn't give up) or updating my skills. I have been spending my time working on MaraDNS instead of doing what it takes to reach my goals: To have a job making a living wage so I can support myself and my girl comfortably in the US (ideally somewhere where it is sunny like California, my home).

So, yeah, what I'm saying is that I'm taking a break from MaraDNS. I have every plan to finish up the Deadwood code and come out with MaraDNS 2.0. But it isn't going to be the end of 2009. Maybe I'll start work on MaraDNS again next week; maybe I'll just let it rest until 2010 sometime, just as I stopped Deadwood development for most of 2008 and only started development up again in early 2009.

Do I want to finish up Deadwood and release MaraDNS 2.0? Yes. Am I going to do it anytime soon? Probably not. I'm having fun downloading and trying out various turn-based strategy video games; I would rather do that right now (or research Chess variants) than develop a program which has only made a very little amount of money for the amount of work I've put in to the code.

I'm growing up and realize that there are more important things than making programs for fun and for free. Yes, I do want to finish up Deadwood mainly to put closure on the project, but I don't think I'll do any MaraDNS development besides basic bug fixes after MaraDNS 2.0 comes out.

- Sam

[1] UUCP: You don't want to know. I remember when an ISP I worked for dropped UUCP support; UUCP was a nightmare to configure and we simply no longer had anyone who could configure our UUCP servers. The *only* thing UUCP can be used for is email and Usenet.

A pet peeve of mine

One pet peeve of mine is when people send MaraDNS support requests or bug reports via private mail. When someone does this, I get irritated and angry to the point that smoke starts coming out of my ears. The thing is that I'm working on rewriting the Deadwood resolver and after spending hours on a given day working on the code, I'm pretty burnt out and just don't have the time to deal with support email.

So, I've made it pretty clear that I don't do free private email MaraDNS support.

Despite this, I got two requests for MaraDNS support via private email last week.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

When I explained my "pay me to support policy" to one of these people, they explained that they didn't know how to file non-security bug reports for MaraDNS. So, I've now clarified that the MaraDNS mailing list is the place to file your bug reports and that I don't have the time to maintain a bug tracker for MaraDNS.

In addition, so that these kinds of emails can be more easily handled, I have just hacked together a Perl script (taking my spam filter Perl script and making the appropriate changes) to make it trivial for me to send a "Show me the money or, if you're a cheapskate, here's how to take this concern to the list" form reply to people who ask for MaraDNS support via private email.

I'm really sorry guys. I'm devoting all of my time I spend developing MaraDNS on getting Deadwood out the door. I just don't have time to adequately handle MaraDNS support or non-security bug reports via private email. Please pay me for my time to take it to the list.