Ah DNS, the often overlooked aspect of running websites. Many people I've spoken to bought a domain from Network Solutions, then one from GoDaddy, and maybe one or two from their web-hosting provider. Settings are all over the place, and they use the tools provided by each registrar to manage the DNS for domains purchased there. While this certainly works, it can become quite a hassle to change things around especially if you want an overview of all of your domains or need to change the IP address of a server.

Several years ago, I found out about EveryDNS which is a great free DNS hosting service. They've been very solid and while they have been down a few times from DDOS attacks at 50Mbps+, they definitely can scale better than my little rack of servers. I donated some money to them and currently have about 60 domains with ~600 DNS entries total hosted with them. With EveryDNS, all of my DNS entries are in the same place and when someone purchases hosting from me, I have them set the authoritative nameservers for their domain to the EveryDNS nameservers. This means that I don't need access to their account information, but I can have quick and easy access to DNS entries if I need to move anything around.

I'm preparing to make some big changes to my servers and the hassle of the point-and-click interface becomes a bit to much. ~1800 clicks or so is a lot more complicated than it needs to be! Additionally, for almost everything else I do on the internet, I prefer to own the hardware and software that my information lives on. To address both of these, I installed PowerDNS with a MySQL backend on a server, and then set up DNS replication to EveryDNS (docs on this). PowerDNS with MySQL let's me change the IP address of a server with one SQL statement instead of lots of mouse clicking, regardless of how many domains I have. This setup also allows me to include DNS configuration as part of my web hosting provisioning scripts which greatly simplifies the process of adding a new website to one of my servers. My DNS server is not listed in the authoritative servers list for domains, so the only queries that it responds to are the AXFR queries from EveryDNS. The only negative of this is that EveryDNS only checks once an hour so I can't do any tinkering with short TTLs, but thats a price I'm willing to pay for now! Hopefully they will enable DNS Notify support in the future which would allow for instantaneous updates, and if my hosting operation gets big enough, I'll just roll my own live DNS servers.

I always have my eyes open for new and better ways to do things, get things done, and share information. I chronicled some of this over a year ago in Web 2.0 and More web apps, and things have changed a bit since then! I'm still using Delicious to manage my bookmarks and Amazon added the ability to add anything to your wishlist from other websites, but those items aren't piped out via their API so thats no fun for my wantlist (which I've been updating for Christmas!).

Plaxo never really became useful to me, nor did 30 Boxes or Basecamp. In the last year, I've been trying to build a more cohesive online presence that doesn't depend so much on Facebook. Enter FriendFeed! All my things from all over the internet pipe into my friendfeed which then gets piped into sites that consume this information like the "other sites" bar here on the left, and my Facebook wall thing. I also signed up for twitter finally and got that tied in to everything.

However, the biggest change in the last few months has been moving from Remember The Milk and Google Calendar to Chandler. Not only is Chandler amazing, it allows me to own my data by running Chandler Server on my own servers so I get simple backups, no unexpected downtime, and the peace of mind that I own the whole stack that contains my information.

Several years ago, I was looking for a good to-do list manager and found out about Chandler but it was in it's infancy and definitely not ready for prime time. I moved around between iCal, sticky notes, paper, text files, and a few other things but none really fit quite right. On August 8, Chandler 1.0 was announced and I decided to give it a shot. First I just used it for my personal tasks related to Gallery, which I stored in Chandler Hub, but in less than a week I realized how powerful of a tool Chandler really was. Next, setting up my own Chandler Server was a breeze. In perhaps an hour I got Chandler Server up and running listening on a local port, set up MySQL as the backend so my existing backup scripts would automatically take care of it, and set up my webserver to do the logging and SSL magic. I stopped using my paid Remember The Milk account and Google Calendar, and over the next few days moved everything into Chandler.

Now, every day after my morning bike ride, I filter through my email (I use the Inbox:0 strategy) either deleting things, responding to quick things, or putting actionable things that take some time into Chandler's desktop client. Once that's empty, I head into Chandler and start down the task list for the day. I have a separate collection for each of the kinds of projects I'm working on (Hosting, House, etc) but usually I hang out in the "Dashboard" view which combines most of my collections. Collections like "Recipies" and ones that don't have actionable items are hidden from my dashboard. This has significantly cut down the amount of time I spend managing myself, and once a week I do a "weekly review" to scan through items marked as "Later" and see if any of them need to be changed. (Right now I have 12 "Now" items, 109 "later" items, and 93 "done" items in my personal collections.) Also, all of my collections synchronize between my desktop and laptop, feed into iCal which syncs to my iPhone, etc, so my information is where I need it when I need it, and I can use Chandler's web interface to get at things if I'm on someone else's computer.

Just using this for my personal things was nice, but my two biggest projects are working on the operations team at SugarCRM and acting as a project manager for Gallery. I set up a Chandler Server at work and we have 5 people sharing a collection called "Sugar Operations" which includes:

• Tasks for people which get assigned by adding something like @chris in the title
• Tnternal HOWTOs (like our machine bootstrapping process) that are still in flux. These get moved to a wiki once they stabilize
• Changing system configuration information
• Meetings and company events that multiple people are attending

It takes a little while to get new people using the shared collection, but once they're in it's an amazingly effective way to work together as a team. We no longer need weekly "On Tap" emails to figure out what is going on because it's all in Chandler, and we can make changes to information without having to log into a wiki each time or email changes around.

Several weeks ago at the Gallery Sprint, everyone else told me to do what I thought was best for managing project overhead so we're now using a shared collection hosted on Chandler Hub to manage the project and the development of Gallery 3. You can see that collection in your web browser here: chandler.galleryproject.org. Again, it's taken a little bit of effort to get everyone using it the same way but the results have been an even bigger deal here. Developers working on open source projects don't really like doing things other than making decisions and developing, and Chandler is a very low overhead way for developers to keep track of what they are doing in such a way that anyone can easily get the big picture in one place. Chandler has gotten rid of the need for weekly status reports to our mailing list, going through lists of action items in weekly meetings, and figuring out who committed to doing what. Everyone knows who is responsible for things and I can finally spend a lot less time harassing people to do things that they committed to doing already. This frees up a lot of time so that developers can get back to developing and our meetings are back to lively discussion and decision making instead of boring project overhead.

Gallery is still using SourceForge to manage feature requests, bugs, and our code repository, as these aren't really things that Chandler is up to at this point. We wish there was a way to report on things in Chandler and associate them with releases, but it would be a lot of work to make this happen. Trac does a great job of this so theres a possibility of switching to Trac in the future which could replace both Chandler and the SourceForge, but I get the feeling that the developer overhead is a lot higher which might cut down on how useful it is.

I can't express how great it is to have everything that I need in one application on my desktop, and I'm looking forward to the day that I can ditch my e-mail client as well!

OpenVZ seems to be the hot open source container based virtualization tool these days. Instead of tools like VMWare and Xen which virtualize the hardware and allow each guest operating system to run their own kernel, OpenVZ uses operating system level virtualization. While less flexible and less "secure" in some instances, this allows for better performance of the guests due to lower overhead.

I've been tinkering with using OpenVZ for a project to provide rapidly deployable emergency copies of infrastructure for situations where the primary and secondary hardware go down (DNS servers, LDAP servers, etc). OpenVZ meets the need here because it has command line management tools, is low overhead, and these kinds of services don't depend on a specific kernel or hardware stack as much as some others might. The tricky part for me is that some of these services live on separate VLANs.

In this setup, each machine (including the OpenVZ host) has two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces bonded together to two ports on separate switches that are stacked together. This provides higher throughput and prevents interruption of service if a switch, cable, or interface fails. The hosts typically don't know about VLANs and the interfaces on the switches are in access mode which automatically tags all traffic to the proper vlan. However, the OpenVZ host will need access to multiple VLANs so that it's guest machines can get to the right places on the network, so some things need to change. It will need it's own VLAN as well as the VLAN for each guest machine.

Firstly, the switchports are configured to trunk the right VLANs to both of the ports that the OpenVZ host is plugged into. Note that if you do this, you'll loose access to the machine so make sure you're connected out-of-band to the console! On the switch in a config shell (Cisco IOS example):

# interface Gi1/0/1
# switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
# switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,20-30
# switchport mode trunk
# interface Gi2/0/1
# switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
# switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,20-30
# switchport mode trunk

Then the OpenVZ machine is configured to support VLANs by adding kernel modules and creating a new interface. Note that these instructions are for RHEL5/CentOS5:

1. Add "modprobe 8021q" and "modprobe vzethdev" to /etc/rc.modules
2. chmod +x /etc/rc.modules
3. Manually run /etc/rc.modules. It will be automatically run when the system boots
4. reconfigure the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 to have no IP or BOOTPROTO information, "ONBOOT=yes" and "MODE=trunk"
5. create /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0.10 like the following:
   

   DEVICE=bond0.10
     IPADDR=10.0.10.2
     NETMASK=255.255.255.0
     GATEWAY=10.0.10.1
     NETWORK=10.0.10.0
     BROADCAST=10.0.10.255
     ONBOOT=yes
     BOOTPROTO=none
     USERCTL=no
     VLAN=yes
     PHYSDEV=bond0
   

6. and load the interface with "ifcfg bond0.10 && ifup bond0.10"
7. make sure that proxy_arp and forwarding are enabled for bond0.10 in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/bond0.10/. If not, you should reconfigure your system to set these by default. Consult your operating system documentation for instructions on this.

Once this is done, you should be able to use this host on the network (on VLAN 10) like nothing changed! If not, make sure routes are set up right, ifconfig looks right, etc. Assuming it works, you're halfway there! Up next is creating an interface for each vlan you want mapped. Here's an example for /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0.20 on VLAN 20:

DEVICE=bond0.20
  ONBOOT=yes
  BOOTPROTO=none
  USERCTL=no
  VLAN=yes
  PHYSDEV=bond0

Note that it doesn't have any IP information. We'll specify this inside of the OpenVZ instance. Next, we actually create a blank OpenVZ instance (you can use an existing one, but this is provided for completeness sake) and give it an eth0 interface. I'm using 20 as the ID here because this instance will be on VLAN 20, but this is not a requirement.

vzctl create 20 --ostemplate centos-5-x86_64-default-5.2-20081013 --config vps.basic
vzctl set 20 --onboot no --save
vzctl set 20 --hostname vlan20host.local --save
vzctl set 20 --numothersock 120 --save
vzctl set 20 --nameserver 10.0.10.1 --save
vzctl start 20
vzctl set 20 --netif_add eth0 --save

On each host, use "eth0" as the name of the interface. OpenVZ will automatically create the eth0 interface in the guest and an interface like "veth20.0" on the host where "20" in the name represents the guest ID and the .0 indicates that this is the default interface for the guest. You could add an eth0.21 interface to the guest with vzctl if you wanted VLAN 21 also piped into the guest, which would create a eth0.21 on the guest and veth20.21 on the host.

Now that it has the interface, enter the instance with "vzctl enter 20" and set up it's networking by creating /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:

DEVICE=eth0
  IPADDR=10.0.20.1
  NETMASK=255.255.255.0
  GATEWAY=10.0.20.1
  NETWORK=10.0.20.0
  BROADCAST=10.0.20.255
  ONBOOT=yes
  BOOTPROTO=none
  USERCTL=no

Then "ifcfg eth0 && ifup eth0". You won't be able to send traffic yet, but configuration inside of the guest here is done. Head back to the OpenVZ host and set up a bridge to connect things. Here, we name the bridge so that it's recognizable as this VLAN and add the VLAN interface and OpenVZ host interface to it. Making one bridge per VLAN is probably the right thing to do, and if multiple guests are on the same VLAN, just add their host interfaces to the same bridge.

brctl addbr vzbr20
brctl addif vzbr20 bond0.20
brctl addif vzbr20 veth20.0
ifup vzbr20 0

Again, make sure that forwarding and arp_proxy are enabled for the bridge and the veth20.0 interface (created by adding eth0 to the guest). And that's it! You should be able to ping the guest's gateway from the guest. If you can't, run a ping from the guest and run tcpdump from the host to see where packets stop, looking at interfaces in this order:

veth20.0
vzbr20
bond0.20
bond0

Whichever one it stops on, make sure you have forwarding and proxy_arp enabled, and make sure that the bridge has the two things it should as members with "brctl show"

Each time the vm is rebooted, you'll need to add it's host interface to the bridge again and may need to re-enable forwarding and proxy_arp depending on how your OS is configured. If you are using a newer version of OpenVZ (>3.0.22) there is a easy workaround for this on the Veth wiki page. There is a more complex workaround for older OpenVZ versions there as well, but I should be using the newest version of OpenVZ when it's time to deploy this thing so I'm waiting!

Hopefully you find this useful, please let me know with a comment on the original article at ckdake.com or via an email if you have any suggestions, comments, or corrections!

Helpful References:
http://wiki.openvz.org/Veth
http://wiki.openvz.org/Venet
http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-and-using-openvz-on-centos5.2-p2

It seems I'm not the only one thats notices that bike companies just seem to do a better job of customer service than anyone else that I've dealt with:

• Bike people are better on Bicycles and Icicles
• New bicycle adventures on San's blog. She doesn't go into depth about how awesome Atlanta Cycling was to her, but they went above and beyond to get her the bike she wanted.
• Bikes and customer service here
• Customer Service is Alive and Well, the last two paragraphs

All of those stories are very representative of my experiences. Most recently, a screw fell out of one of my Crank Brothers Quattro SL pedals. They're just decorative and don't affect the functionality of the pedals, but I sent them an email (during Interbike when everyone in the cycling world shouldn't be checking their email) and they quickly responded that they'd get a replacement out ASAP. A few days later, an envelope showed up with new screws and a few other parts for those pedals "just in case", as well as another card from "The Pedal Spa", a handful of stickers, and a note from "Drew" suggesting that I should put Blue Loctite on those screws to keep it from happening again. Awesome.

It's definitely been a busy couple of weeks. We've had a few weekend events at work as we slowly are moving things to a setup that will prevent us from needing to do anything on weekends, and there's been a whole lot of bike riding. But first, my most recent tinkering with HDR photography:

Thats three exposures of one of the trees in my backyard, taken at 11mm on the new tripod with a remote shutter. On to what I've been up to the past few weeks that you might be interested in:

• Tomorrow morning I'll hit 2000 miles of road riding this year, with 1750 of them on the newest road bike. That's bringing me pretty close to 4000 miles so far since February 1st, so hopefully I'll round off the year with 5000+?
• I got new wheels on my track bike and will be training on that this winter for next years season (assuming I don't break anything between now and then!). I've been mountain biking a couple of times and am getting back into the habit of 30mile+ mountain rides, and I'm slowly working out a training plan so that I can maybe win some races next year.
• After 20 or so years of never having a real camera tripod and taking pictures, I finally purchased one. Here's a crummy picture of the Acratech Ultimate ballhead with Leveler mounted on the Gitzo Explorer Basalt legs. It's sturdy, light, easy to use, and I'm looking forward to using it a lot. Hopefully it will last me another 20 years or so.
• I was able to get a Wii Fit for list price! Daniel couldn't have said it better: the internet rules.
• FM.24.08 happened again and was an even bigger success than last year. The tracking system worked great, but I unfortunately didn't take as many pictures as at FM.24.07 last year. Here is this year's good set.
• The final Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed of the year went down and I was able to take plenty of pictures there since almost nobody else from Faster Mustache showed up to spectate! Friday Night Sprint pics and pictures from Saturday. After sprints on Friday, I rode around town and took some awesome night shots from the top of a building in downtown Atlanta, and before FoS started on Saturday San and I went by Connolly Nature Preserve and I got some shots of the champion trees there. (Read more about the trees here).
• Lastly, I'm slowly whipping my mini-web hosting company into shape. If you're looking for hosting, head to ckdake.com/hosting and keep your eyes peeled on www.ithought.org for some exciting news sometime in the next month or so.

This past weekend, Ben and I drove North for some mountain biking. We stayed at my Grandparent's lakehouse on Lake Rabun, and drove up to Tsali in North Carolina on Saturday morning. Unfortunately we didn't plan super well and the two trails there I wanted to ride (the left and right loops) are Horse-only on Saturdays, but this turned out not to be much of a mistake. We rode Mouse Branch first including the optional scenic overlook portion, and it was pretty nice. The trail was a bit crowded and some people going at a leisurely pace didn't want to let anyone pass them, but we managed to finish the 9.7 miles in under an hour which is pretty fast for us. (The woman that won the gold in Olympic mountain biking this year averaged 12mph if I remember right.) After PBJs, we did a lap on Thompson Loop which was awesome. The first part is very fast singletrack, then a lot of climbing, and then one of the longest and fastest downhill sections of singletrack I've ever ridden (elevation graph). 25mph on a mountain bike for a couple of minutes feels pretty fast! So of course, we had to ride that loop again for a total of ~25 miles for the day and as many hours on the trail as it took us to drive there.

On Sunday, we drove the 15 minutes from the lakehouse to the Stonewall Falls Loop in Clayton, GA. From reading around online, I didn't know quite what to expect. There was only one car in the gravel parking lot and no real signage, but we hopped on our bikes and set out. The first 7 miles or so seemed like they were all uphill, and for the first time in a while I actually had to walk up a few sections, but we were rewarded with the second 7 miles that were mostly downhill. I don't need to ride this again, but probably will if I'm at the lake for more than a day. Ben really liked it, so you might! It was "real" mountain biking with almost every kind of terrain: rocks and dirt, slowly recovering forest fire areas, flat trail following a stream with several stream crossings, super sketchy downhill sections on powerline cuts, banked turns, sand, narrow cuts through heavy undergrowth, steep uphills, etc. I like trails that are a little more consistent so that I can get in the appropriate "zone" for the trail, and this one kept me on my toes. My arms are a bit scratched up from all the bushes, and my shoes are still drying out, but if you're comfortable on a mountain bike and in the area this trail is worth trying. Our loop ended up being a little over 13 miles and took us about 2 hours.

These were the first mountain bike rides I've done of the length I was used to before the whole collarbone thing, and while it's nice to be back on that bike again, I still have some catching up to do in the mountains and on the track! Since Feb 1st this year, 1593 miles on road rides, 230 on casual ones, 822 on a trainer, 125 on the mountain bike, and 108 at the track.

So for no real reason, I'm pretty interested in disasters: finding out details, figuring out what went wrong, etc. I'm finishing up a great book: "Normal Accidents" that is highly recommended to anyone else interested in these sorts of things. (Though you should probably read Silent Spring first.)

As part of this interest, every now and then I'll spend a few hours poking around the Internet and Wikipedia to learn more. If you're not aware of any of the huge human-caused catastrophes, here are some jumping off points on Wikipedia to get you started:

• Environmental disasters in the US - Love Canal in particular
• Medical Disasters
• Civilian radiation accidents (not involving fission, fissile matter or a reactor)
• Civilian nuclear accidents (involving fission, a reactor or fissile material from one)
• Military nuclear accidents

So after spending who knows how many hours reading around, here are a few things I've found that are worth sharing:

• The Rocky Flats Plant just outside of Denver, CO was used for nuclear weapons production. As detailed in the Wikipedia article, it had a horrendous safety record and during it's operation, none of this was known to the public. See this brief article in Time magazine for an example. The facility has been shut down, and it's pretty interesting to see the transformation in satellite photos. Check out this map on maps.live.com and zoom in and out, note what disappears! The same map on maps.google.com is a mix of older photography and newer ones, so only the left half of the plant is there. Note the highway that goes in a circle around Denver and how it's missing a section that would have gone through this area. According to wikipedia this work was completed in October 2005 and the site is on it's way to being a wildlife refuge.
• While the Chernobyl disaster was huge, most people don't know about all of the other awful nuclear/environmental things going on in the Soviet Union at the time. Disasters at Mayak between 1945 and the late 1960s have killed many and exposed over half a million people to dangerous amounts of radiation. You can see what remains of the biggest failed reactor here, and from what I understand it's essentially just being left there because it's too expensive to clean up. Lake Karachay, the lake they used _for dumping their nuclear waste into_ has been called "the most polluted spot on earth". You should take a look at it here: make sure to zoom out and pan around to get a sense of scale.
• And then there are the bioweapons. Things like a 1971 smallpox outbreak caused by Soviet aerosol weapons tests, an anthrax leak in Sverdlovsk, Soviet Union in 1979, etc. These have all kinds of potential to go wrong and it's worth reading Biohazard by Ken Alibek if you want to know more about these sorts of things. (Or atleast follow some links about Biopreparat.)

I hope that was interesting, and I bet I'll post something like this every now and then. Let me know what you think!

It's that time of year again: In a few weeks, we at Faster Mustache are putting on our 4th annual 24 hour urban relay! Head on over to 24.fastermustache.org to pre-register to guarantee your spot, as this is the cycling event of the year in the south east, and the only event of it's kind in the world.

September 6th and 7th at Johnny's Pizza on North Highland. Take it easy on a 6 person team and just have a good time doing at least one lap a person (~10 miles or so), or go for the solo win which will take 300+ miles of riding! Trust me, the prizes are worth it!