The time is near for me to renew splat.cx, but sadly times have changed from when I originally registered the domain, back then it was far cheaper than a .com or a .net. Since then deregulation and competition arose to reduce the price of .com’s and .net’s, so the powers that be (now calling themselves the Christmas Island Internet Administration (CIIA hmmm)) decided that deregulation was a good thing for them too, so the old Nic.cx (operating under the name Planet 3 internet out of the UK) who had managed the .cx TLD up until this time became niccx.com and decided they didn’t want to be a registrar any more. So now there was room for a deregulated registry system to operate, and thusly a registrar appeared, NetDNS.cx who I had to switch over to when the time for renewal came around. The deregulation happened around mid 2001 and resulted in the whole .cx registry being frozen for about 6 months (no new domains, no expired domains), but this registrar change for me happened around January 2002. Sadly tne new registrar decided on their own pricing scheme which still stands today. Sadly only because it cost much more than what Planet 3 were charing. Fortunately for me, when I switched over to them they had a 2 years for the price of one deal going so the price didn’t bother me at the time because it hadn’t really gone up at all. Fast forward to December 2003, now there are 2 registrars operating, Christmas Island Internet Domains (a part of Indian Ocean Territories Telecom Pty. Ltd.) and NetDNS (trading as Christmas Island Technology Corp (CITC) Limited, who I’m still with), and if you followed those links you’ll see there must be some price fixing going on. If I get a minute spare in the next 6 months I might look into the possibility of opening up a .cx registrar myself, of course I’d never meet the requirements, but you’ll never know if I never try now will we.

Now to get to my main point. I’m thinking of ditching splat.cx (because I could register 3 .com/.net/.org domains for the price), which (due to a change in the policies) could mean no one could ever register it again. That’s right, now you have to register under a subdomain of .cx (like .com.au .net.au etc, except these are different) oh and it doesn’t seem to be enforcing it yet. So here’s what I’m offering. If you want to save the one and only Splat.CX you can donate money to a paypal account of mine, and in recognition of your act of charitable giving (after all it is Christmas isn’t it?) I’ll provide you with a mail alias and even a subdomain with webspace to boot! (With one catch, the subdomain and webspace will have to wait until the colo box happens, but the mail alias I can do right now). Now the pay pal account I’d like the money sent to is paypal at splat.cx. If you do send me something, drop me an email to let me know what mail alias and subdomain you want. Alternatively for those of joo without paypal accounts, you can just cash me up, but that removes the option of anonymity.

If you got through all that you will need this. Adventure and joy (don’t ask) at work lead me to this site full of gold, Chronicles of George. Ahh the memories of the help desk, such fond times where had.

I’ll be AFK for a week as I’ll be in Esperance but since E2 is back up you should all be fine without me. I tried to setup a slashdot to sms gateway, but failed to find a functioning web to sms gateway And because telstra GPRS internet is charged at 2.2 cents per kilobyte (AKA $22.53 per meg) I won’t be using that either. If only I had a GSM handset with serial cable and built in modem, then I could dial into my home network over the mobile network, because off peak that would be heaps cheaper. I have 2 functioning sim cards too, perhaps further research is needed.

The dinosaurs died because they were lonely.

I now have a snapgear router at home and they rock. Mrtg is up here.

Reload ran, ok. I wasn’t pleased with the network performance at all. It should have been lots better considering the new 16 port gigabit switch in the middle of it all. Ever since my dodgy dlink dsl modem I’ve been cautions of dlink gear, it just doesn’t have the professional polish it should. Now I’m about to embark on a journey with a dlink gigabit nic (vs the realteck minitar gig nics I have now, which work fine for me, except the linux driver isn’t as stable when your a NFS client pulling 30meg a sec or more, oh and theres that little problem people have if they aren’t armed with intel chipset mainboards). The

A new version of emule plus came out so I ported my waix only mod to it, not that it really matters because my quota is now 16gig/16gig (for the mathematically challenged, thats 32 gig a month) and I’ve run out of things to download again.

Churning to swiftel next month.

Web hosting front has slowed, interest is still there, but it needs lots of careful work by me now and I’m all burned out from work. But since I have holidays now it might get done. I’d rather write it once and be done with it rather than code it quick and dirty now, and then patch it for the next few years (reminds me of somewhere with a certain product). Also I have some minor mail/dns issues which I’m sorting out now, this has annoyed me slightly.

I’ve been getting deep and meaningful again lately, and I guess I’ll be around for at least another 6 months (rental lease) so my overseas trek may have to wait a bit. New years party at Grants… hmmm

Linux doesn’t crash. It "creatively parks".

The server farm is growing temporarily. Home now has a full domain hosting ability, web, mail, dns, woot. After some initial hickups which were corrected when I had patience (and red bull) it’s operating smoothly. Interesting enough, within 24 hours of opening up port 25 to the evil internet I had some spamming fscker try to relay spam through me. Fortunately as a well behaved and good manored internet citizen I don’t relay mail like a 2 dollar whore so they didn’t get anywhere, but it was an interesting event to observe. I happened to be watching the mail log file as it happened. I ran the ORDB mail scan against it and after over an hour of attempting to relay through me it gave me the all clear. This of course was in late september and now I’m reviewing this partial post in december. My has time passed. Since then the box has proven it’s stability in it’s current config (see here and here (there was a power failure in early October)).

SSL Wrap is officially good, not that I ever need to bypass web proxies anywhere grin. Off peak quotas are not nice. Though arach.net’s quotas are going up from 1 January 2004. Nearly by enough to stop me churning to swiftel.

Colo a go go. This means if you’re interested in full featured affordable and flexable web hosting, stay tuned.

Reload has different colo and was running out of my server farm for testing in mid September.

I’ve sourced some more motivational music because I really needed it for a while there.

Site was down for a bit (ok a fair bit), but is now running from my house until the new colo shows up in January. It went down because Portland (bless their little soals) decided to stop offering php on their free accounts, and then 2 days later emailed everyone to tell them. So I took the site down until now.

Lots has happened since my last post, way back in september. Off the top of my head, my parents are back, I’ve been getting into the comical horror flicks now (warming up for scary movie 3 which will be out soon), work is heating up with a deadline approaching. I’m taking a few weeks off work over christmas/new year, reload 9 is this weekend and I hope goes well.

As usual there will be more soon.

Sleeping is the only thing that makes my life worthwhile. I can dream I’m somewhere decent.