Category Archives: Science and Technology

Updated: Jackass Takes Down Godaddy DNS Servers

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Godaddy Rack Space
Update: Godaddy announced today (Sep 11, 2012) that it was an internal issue that caused the outage, and the punk hacker was just trying to make himself look cool by saying he did it. He’s still a jackass regardless.

So I’m wondering why in the hell some of my services hosted at home aren’t working anymore. Well the answer is simple, some jackass decided to screw with Godaddy’s DNS servers and all my domains are using Godaddy hosted DNS servers.

Thanks a lot, jackass.

Well it looks like I’m going to have to do a little work to make my DNS structure a little more resilient to failure. Currently, Godaddy is a single point of failure for me. And here I thought I was in good shape because I was having them host it instead of doing it locally. Perhaps I’ll set up my own authoritative server and have Godaddy act as a secondary. Of course I’ll probably have to pay extra to do it that way. I would know for sure except that… well… Godaddy’s own site is down. I’ll bet they’re slightly more pissed off than I am.

Windows Server 2012 First Impression

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So I took the frowny-face’s advice and searched for the HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED error. As it turns out, this error occurs because Server 2012 will not install on ESXi 4.1. Looks like we won’t be running any Server 2012 for a while then! I’ll just have to play with it on my VMware Workstation 9 install.

I Gave it 103 Percent!

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NIPSCO seems to think I use an inordinate amount of electricity

So NIPSCO (our local utility monopoly) sends out these cool things that tell you your energy consumption relative to your neighbors. Well I’m proud to say that I scored 103% higher than my neighbors on electricity! I guess that’s what happens when you run your own web server and two Active Directory domain controllers virtualized on an ESXi 5.0 host, a Windows 2003 file server with over 3 terabytes of attached storage, an Exchange 2010 server, an HP 5300 series modular core switch, an Astaro / Sophos enterprise class firewall and a multi-VLAN network capable of keeping your guest network separate so that your neighbor who is using your wireless can get to the internet without touching your home network. That’s not to mention any of the small appliance-type things that round out my technical infrastructure such as my Cisco 1131 wireless access point, a Vonage analog telephone adapter, the cable modem, several large fans to keep the corner that my servers are in supplied with cool air, a satellite receiver with built-in DVR, oh and the stupid ink-jet printer that my wife insisted on having. (I preferred my HP LaserJet 4100, but she wanted color…)

So you see… Information Technology isn’t a job… it’s a lifestyle.

Pro Tip #3

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Windows Phone 7, Exchange ActiveSync and error 85010014:

If you recently set a user’s password to expire so that they have to change it upon their next login, and you’re setting up their email account on a new Windows phone at the same time, you might get ActiveSync error 85010014.

Hint: It’s because you set their password to expire, dipshit!

I spent far too long reading troubleshooting guides before I figured that one out.
Hopefully this post will spare someone the same fate.