French Tutor in Cambridge

Posted by robbiebow on 29 September, 2009 under cambridge, geek, stuff | Be the First to Comment

I offered to make a tiny web site for a friend who is a French Tutor in Cambridge and it brought back to me the joy of doing something simple, clear and honest. Not that my day job is dishonest, but it is complex and sometimes unclear what I actually add to the world. And it’s often not much to do with the web and all to do with the engines behind the web interface.

Which is good – don’t get me wrong – but playing around with CSS, and images, and optimizing a site for search engines is, well, *fun*. Stripped of collaboration, scrums, staging, peer reviews, release processes, rollback processes, credentials, Agile, XP, SDLC, UAT, OAT, QAT, AJAX, MRDs and down to a budget of £6 a year, I’ve made something useful, something that ranks well for specific keywords (think “French Tutor in Cambridge” – and hell, you know this post is all part of that optimization process), something that is *already* making a tangible difference to the world I know.

Putting the punk rock back into web development

Using a local DNS cache on Debian

Posted by robbiebow on 4 September, 2009 under geek, perl | Be the First to Comment

I created a very simple script to check a variety of sites are up and running (or at least not returning errors to HTTP requests), and run it as a cron job on three different servers. False positive responses started occurring, and this was down to DNS errors from $hosting_companies’ nameservers.

To reduce these I installed dnsmasq to act as a local DNS cache on each machine:

aptitude update
aptitude install dnsmasq

This also required adding the following line to /etc/resolv.conf to ensure my script (and other applications making DNS queries) used dnsmasq first:

nameserver 127.0.0.1

Making sure to put that above the other nameserver entries. Now DNS responses are 0-3ms instead of the ~ 70ms before and the false positive alerts have dried up.

See http://wiki.debian.org/HowTo/dnsmasq for more details on setting up dnsmasq