Libel

Roughly a month ago, the Pakistani government, acting to censor online content deemed blasphemous, blocked access to blogger.com blogs. The rationale given: SOME of the blogs there re-posted the cartoons and accompany commentary that are considered extremely blasphemous [by Muslims]. Read, SOME, not all. Instead of stretching their muscles a bit, the Pakistani government, with the help of local ISPs, blocked the entire blogspot.com domain. Duh!

Ever since I started rolling a blog, I have stuck to Blogger.com for its free, easy-to-use blog service. If you are reading this, chances are good you might be reading it via my Blogger account. However, this is going to be the last blog entry I’m going to publish on Blogger.com. Depending on how things unfold, and after some time, I might even wipe out all the blog entries on my Blogger account.

Meanwhile, I’ve moved over to WordPress.com (WP). It took me an entire morning and a better part of the afternoon today to migrate all my posts over to WP.

My blog has moved over to: ayaz.wordpress.com

As I approached the notice board in the most populated area of the University, and glanced a look at the exam schedule, I nearly passed out. A paper that was going to be held the following day had been rescheduled today, late in the afternoon. I was shocked. I had no idea when that happened.

Moving towards one of the seminars, which are used as examination halls during exams, I saw many classmates running here and there with pale faces. In the seminar, some classmates were having a field day teasing others regarding the unexpected change in the schedule. As I drew near a desk I had quickly decided I would occupy, a mate asks, "Heard the shocker?" "Yep, I did!", I reply indifferently, in part because I still thought it was all a misunderstanding on the administration's part. There had been no notice that I had seen, no email that I had received. Neither did any of the students. It seemed as if someone had rougishly replaced the copy of the time table glued to one side of the notice board with a corrupted copy. It was completely unbelievable.

After the exam, which went unbelievably great, a bunch of us hurdled over to the administration department, and confronted the guy in-charge. Apparently, he claimed that several notices and emails underlining the change in schedule were posted and sent four days earlier. On the contrary, it was only this morning that we had seen a single notice regarding the change in schedule -- no email whatsoever had been received by any of the students. He was bent on not believing in us, until the phone rang, and the director had a word with him.

To our relief, the paper has now been moved over to next Saturday. Phew!

I have gotta' hand it to FAST's administration department.

Thanks to gm142 on irc.freenode.net##slackware, I learned how to instruct tar not to include certain sub-directories into the final tarball. Here is how it is done:

tar --exclude /dir/to/exclude -cpf /dir/to/save/tarball.tar /dir/to/backup

When I fell ill earlier this year, I almost gave up. I just couldn't bear it anymore. And if it hadn't been for mom's support [and care], it likely would have taken a lot longer for me to recover. Despite having a fickle memory, I clearly remember mom's words, which she gently expressed when I was shivering in fever, "It is only a bad time. It will pass soon."

When you are down, when you are out, depressed, morose, everything sucks. As if nearly by nature, a person who is morose tends to consider the worthlessness of their life, how pointless their existence is; they tend to feel damaged, destroyed. It is the opposite of the sensations and feelings most drugs infuse: Ecstacy, for example, numbs the mind, thereby making anything the consumer does in its influence enjoyable. Depression acts in the other direction.

Being depressed, you find it hard to resist those rouge thoughts and disturbing feelings. It sucks, alright! What sucks more is your giving in to those thoughts and feelings. If you find yourself thinking how insignificant you are, and if you start believing in that, then it is high time you really should try to purge those thoughts. Period!

Being pessimistic, at times, is practical. I think being pessimistic, at times, is practical ONLY for those who know well how to cope up with circumstances, how to cope up with the sort of things that break you down real bad.

It is good to have hope, to be optimistic, to have goals you believe you can accomplish, because being morose and putting yourself into a sorry state of recline is, well, simply foolish, and, as much as I hate to have saying this, harmful.

Smile freely, because, simply, it is great to smile! :-)

Surfing Slashdot.org tonight, I bumped into OldVersion.com. Surprisingly, it makes available a humongous 638 older versions of some 67 programs. Phew!

This is truly a random thought, one which I typed down within the time frame of a couple of seconds.

"In no time differences arise which force one to examine things from an entirely different perspective."

ISC's BIND, the Berkely Internet Name Domain system, can be set up to act as: a primary nameserver, secondary nameserver, and a caching-only nameserver (or combinations of these). While configuring a DNS system per se is a beast of a task, setting it up to act as a nameserver for a local LAN network is pretty easy.

Before setting up BIND, knowledge of how the DNS system works is absolutely necessary. There are countless tutorials spread across the Internet which not only describe the ins and outs of the DNS system at length, but also clearly explain how to configure BIND in its various configurations.

BIND reads data and configuration information from several files. Under Slackware, these are: /etc/named.conf, /var/named/localhost.zone, /var/named/named.ca, /var/named/named.local, /var/named/forward.domain.tld.zone, /var/named/reverse.domain.tld.zone. The first four files come, by default, with BIND, while the last two files need to be created by users according to their needs.

For demonstration, I am going to set up a domain "uaaa.rk" for a local network. Files required, in this setting, by BIND are: /etc/named.conf, /var/named/ayaz/localhost.zone, /var/named/ayaz/named.ca, /var/named/named.local, /var/named/ayaz/forward.uaaa.rk.zone, /var/named/ayaz/reverse.uaaa.rk.zone

The contents of these file, as favours the scenario in question, are as follows:

/etc/named.conf
options {
directory "/var/named/ayaz";
/*
* If there is a firewall between you and nameservers you want
* to talk to, you might need to uncomment the query-source
* directive below. Previous versions of BIND always asked
* questions using port 53, but BIND 8.1 uses an unprivileged
* port by default.
*/
//query-source address * port 53;
};

//
// a caching only nameserver config
//
zone "." {
type hint;
file "named.ca";
};

zone "localhost" {
type master;
file "localhost.zone";
allow-update { none; };
};

zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" {
type master;
file "named.local";
allow-update { none; };
};

zone "uaaa.rk" {
type master;
file "forward.uaaa.rk.zone";
};

zone "50.168.192.in-addr.arpa" {
type master;
file "reverse.uaaa.rk.zone";
};

/var/named/ayaz/localhost.zone
$TTL 86400
$ORIGIN localhost.
@ 1D IN SOA @ root (
42 ; serial (d. adams)
3H ; refresh
15M ; retry
1W ; expiry
1D ) ; minimum

1D IN NS @
1D IN A 127.0.0.1



/var/named/ayaz/named.local
$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA localhost. root.localhost. (
2006022707 ; Serial
28800 ; Refresh
14400 ; Retry
3600000 ; Expire
86400 ) ; Minimum
IN NS localhost.

1 IN PTR localhost.



/var/named/ayaz/forward.uaaa.rk.zone
$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA ns.uaaa.rk. root.localhost. (
2
1h
15m
30d
1h )

@ IN NS ns.uaaa.rk.
@ IN MX 0 mail.uaaa.rk.

localhost IN A 127.0.0.1

ns IN A 192.168.50.1
www IN A 192.168.50.1
ftp IN A 192.168.50.1
ssh IN A 192.168.50.1
mail IN A 192.168.50.1



/var/named/ayaz/reverse.uaaa.rk.zone
$TTL 86400
@ IN SOA ns.uaaa.rk. root.localhost (
2 ; serial
28800 ; refresh
7200 ; retry
604800 ; expire
86400 ; ttl
)

@ IN NS ns.uaaa.rk.

; The first row are digits appended to 192.168.50., it seems.
1 IN PTR www.uaaa.rk.
1 IN PTR ssh.uaaa.rk.
1 IN PTR ftp.uaaa.rk.
1 IN PTR mail.uaaa.rk.


That is it! Start BIND, on Slackware, through /etc/rc.d/rc.bind, and voila! BIND is running.

Note: The files localhost.zone, named.ca, and named.local require no changes.

Tip: If BIND is bailing out mysteriously, execute it in debug mode by calling /usr/sbin/named -g. Doing so will, no doubt, save lots of your time.

Learn to keep your mouth shut!