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New single released

 

July 21 2016

I have released a new single this month. Also, some thoughts on current events and MaraDNS.

==New single released==

I have released another single from my slowly developing album (as a single parent with a full time job, it’s going to take time to finish the album). It’s called “Foggy Beach Party” and it’s available to listen to or buy on my Bandcamp page:

https://caulixtla.bandcamp.com/album/foggy-beach-party
The A-side of this single, “Foggy Beach Party”, is a mid-tempo dance number which also has a nice ambient feel to it. The B-side, “Clouds”, is a purely ambient song.

==Race doesn’t matter to kids==

This month, the week after the Dallas shootings, and just before the Baton Rogue shootings, my daughter — white latina — had a positive experience playing in the park with some black and Asian children. Indeed, I was the only non-latino white at the park’s playground. Was there any conflict or name calling? No, just some kids sharing the park in a friendly, civilized manner.

It’s a shame that multiple races of kids playing in the park together are more mature than the click bait articles and hideous comment sections which constitute modern journalism. The forces which want a race war are not winning here — Martin Luther King’s dream of little black kids and little white kids being together is very much a reality.

Then again, I live in a state where the Republican party pulled out the racism card two decades ago in an attempt to energize their base. It didn’t work — and now they have no power at all in state level politics.

==MaraDNS: Not chasing moving goalposts==

MaraDNS is an open-source project I did in the first 2000s decade to keep my skills current while I lived in Mexico.

Summary: Some domains don’t resolve when using Deadwood as a fully recursive resolver, and I don’t have time to fix the issue.

When I originally wrote MaraDNS, in 2001, I went to a lot of effort to have it handle CNAME glue the same way legacy versions of BIND handled it, without the resulting security problems BIND had.

When I rewrote that code for Deadwood in 2010, I used the same algorithm.

Let’s look at a real world example, cdn.kraftmusic.com:

cdn.kraftmusic.com. CNAME kraftmusic.kraftmusic.netdna-cdn.com.

kraftmusic.kraftmusic.netdna-cdn.com. A 141.8.225.31

MaraDNS looks at this, and stores, in the slot for “cdn.kraftmusic.com”, the IP 141.8.225.31. However, the people serving DNS records for Kraftmusic.com have an out of date IP for their CNAME glue. Here’s the real IP from one of the nameservers for netdna-cdn.com:

kraftmusic.kraftmusic.netdna-cdn.com. A 94.46.159.2

Like the issue of CNAMEs being combined with other records, I have no plans to fix this issue, for pretty much the same reasons. I might change my stance in five years when my child is a little older, but, ever since I became a single parent, I have not had time to play the “let’s update Deadwood to resolve every single corner case bug-for-bug the way BIND does” game without getting paid for my work.

I encourage aspiring programmers to fork MaraDNS and fix this issue themselves. Use The Source Luke (UTSL). However, please don’t call your forks “MaraDNS.”

2022 update: I finally fixed this bug in MaraDNS-3.5.0023

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