test please delete

[RichardCranium]

I installed my new Netgear WG111 USB WiFi adaptor and immediately my server reported high outbound traffic.

Now why would the Adaptor monitoring software be tring to do MX lookups on www.microsoft.com, www.yahoo.com, www.intel.com and www.google.com ? It does it over and over again.

I look forward to the answer from their support people...

[voodooflux]

It's a good job you're made of money.

It is a remarkably expensive hobby

[RichardCranium]

It is a remarkably expensive hobby

And that's when you don't have kids.

[voodooflux]

And that's when you don't have kids.

True, I seem to be amassing quite a collection myself. I could try and claim that it is merely to encourage the kids' hobby, but in reality I'm just a at heart.

[voodooflux]

True, I seem to be amassing quite a collection myself. I could try and claim that it is merely to encourage the kids' hobby, but in reality I'm just a at heart.

But the kids do provide a convenient excuse

[voodooflux]

I bid you all good night

[RichardCranium]

I bid you all good night

[RichardCranium]

I think this cartoon is very sad. Or rather, the alt text is.

[NickFitz]

It's a good job you're made of money.

sausage rolls

[NickFitz]

I installed my new Netgear WG111 USB WiFi adaptor and immediately my server reported high outbound traffic.

Now why would the Adaptor monitoring software be tring to do MX lookups on www.microsoft.com, www.yahoo.com, www.intel.com and www.google.com ? It does it over and over again.

I look forward to the answer from their support people...

I read an interview recently with the guy who's responsible for keeping www.microsoft.com up and running. He has to deal with things like the fact that everybody assumes that the domain will always be there, so they build pings to it into their firmware as a way of checking if the device has an Internet connection or not

FWIW, my own heuristic is:

1. news.bbc.co.uk
2. slashdot.org
3. nickfitz.co.uk

If they're all down, then I conclude that my Internet connection isn't working. However, I do not build this heuristic into the firmware of hundreds of thousands of devices and then distribute them via retail channels throughout the world. That would be stupid

The other comment that stuck with me was about various DoS attacks: ping floods, SYN floods, all that kind of thing.

He explained that it was never a matter of when, just of how much at the moment

This is one of the reasons why I prefer to shove any webapp I want to keep working on to Amazon's EC2: I've still got all the inherent problems of keeping a distributed application working, but the heavy duty tulipstorms will be taken care of by Amazon's people, who have been dealing with that stuff for years.

Returning to the original point: why the fsck would a WiFi adapter repeatedly check the DNS MX records (of all things) of those domains? It sounds like epic fail