[geeks] ohno

[Mouse]

> I'm replying specifically to provide positive acknowledgement that
> your message to the mailing list made it out to (at least some of)
> the world.

Thank you!  I assumed it would get to anyone the list was reaching at
all, but I didn't know how large a set that would be.

>> Back years ago, I had ssh access to ohno.mrbill.net.

(This was related to the Sunhelp page I wrote about headless SLC/ELC
operation.  It's also possible I lost the access during Mr. Bill's
tenure and I just never noticed.  It's not as if I had occasion to ssh
there very often.)

>> I tried to use it, just now, after rigging my DNS to give the
>> correct address, and I'm getting ETIMEDOUT.  (I was hoping to find
>> files containing the DNS zones, so I could snapshot all the data.)
> That would have been real nice.

If anyone does get hold of them somehow, I do hope they'll be spread
relatively widely, to insulate against future loss.

I already tried to do an AXFR query.  No luck.

> This may be a case of thinking that sunhelp.org was safe and not
> realizing that it was dependent on mrbill.net.

I'm not sure.

mrbill.net seems to be registered through namecheap...but so is
sunhelp.org.  And whois.namecheap.com says that mrbill.net's Updated
Date is 2018-09-10, and that sunhelp.org's is 2019-08-18.  So I'm not
sure that it *is* a simple case of domainsquatting.

Yesterday, when I first noticed this, I did some traceroutes.
Traceroutes to the publicly-visible addresses for really.mrbill.net and
ohyes.mrbill.net went really wonky in the vicinity of Level3.  So I
also have a certain level of suspicion that this is at least partially
an artifact of something being severely broken at Level3.  (I
tracerouted from home, from a machine coloed at work, from a guest
account on a machine in...Arkansas, I think, and from ftp.netbsd.org in
California, and the common thread was that after a number of apparently
reasonable hops, they hit 4.7.21.195, or in some cases 4.7.21.194, an
anonymous Level 3 host, and it all went wonky from there.  The
traceroute from home even ended up looping back to a machine at my
provider's, a machine that, if I traceroute to it directly, is only
four hops away, two of them within my house network.)

I sent a quick note to Level 3's NOC contact from the ARIN record.  No
response (yet), but I'd rather they worked on fixing it rather than
replying, if that's what it's a choice between.

> I'm afraid that SunHelp and the rest of Bill's domains may go quietly
> into the night, without any rage.  :-(

Well, in a technical sense, it seems we (FWVO "we") can just configure
our respective DNS servers as authoritative and ignore what the rest of
the world thinks about mrbill.net and sunhelp.org.

I don't like it, but it's better than losing it entirely.  It'd at
least keep the list operational until someone can get hold of someone
and straighten all this out.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B