SSH Public Key Authentication

Tonight I disabled password authentication entirely for ssh.
If you haven’t set up public key authentication yet feel free to contact me or possibly read a how-to:

Like this one.

This security setting was a long time coming I’ve gotten rather tired of going through all the “script kiddie” failed login attempts.
I apologize if this makes this a bit more inconvenient for anyone but security does / has to come first after all.

That’s all for now.

OpenDNS Issue (Gmail.com)

So if anyone has been having issues emailing to gmail users lately I finally found out why.
OpenDNS apparently is having kittens doing proper resolves for any of it.

Now if you’re an OpenDNS user you might say my settings were wrong or something.
Well I reviewed all my settings (disabled all security stuff and filtering) and I would get a bunch of NXDOMAIN(3) errors.

host gmail.com:
gmail.com has address 74.125.228.53
gmail.com has address 74.125.228.54
Host gmail.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Whereas using he.net’s dns:
host gmail.com:
gmail.com has address 74.125.225.117
gmail.com has address 74.125.225.118
gmail.com has IPv6 address 2607:f8b0:4009:802::1016
gmail.com mail is handled by 10 alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 20 alt2.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 30 alt3.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 40 alt4.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
gmail.com mail is handled by 5 gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.

Quite a big difference eh?

So for the time being we will stop using OpenDNS as our primary dns provider until the issue is resolved.

Site Launches

So I finally launched the new web site for Inexistence.org around 4 am this morning.
Now my site matches the design of it as well so you’ll know off the bat that they are related.

I’ve got quite a bit of changes in the pipeline for Inexistence.org users and I’ll be cross
posting here and on the main site (it has a blog section now).

Don’t forget we’re also on Facebook and Google+.
Don’t have a “company” Twitter account but you can always follow mine.

More news coming soon…

Router Damaged

So late last night we had a storm of epic proportions which caused quite a bit of flooding to occur.
While the server is fine it fried our network router / switch entirely.

I brought over my secondary repeating router to fill in the service gap for now.
We really need to get / replace the current router with a different one as this is only a stopgap solution.

If you are a current user of inexistence and enjoy our services then I please ask you to donate
any amount to help fix this massive issue.

You can use the button below to help out:

QoS Enabled (Again)

So I once again enabled QoS (I forgot to enable it when we came back to
using dd-wrt from the airport extreme).

For those who wonder what QoS is that explains it pretty well.

To explain it in easier terms I had to reserve part of the network so upstream
cannot be flooded causing a denial of service. Now mind you a very slight denial
of service more of a lag of service and this fixes the issue quite well. Sadly
this also causes another issue and that is people will now download slightly slower
from the server but everything will be more responsive so the trade off is entirely worth it.

The reason I re-enabled this service is because I’ve noticed several users sending very
large attachments (email) to yahoo. Now normally this isn’t much of an issue but yahoo uses
a deferral system the basically causes inexistence to keep retrying to send said email.
Which yahoo rejects until they decide when it’s ok for the email to be delivered.

(Yes we use DKIM and SPF so there is nothing I can do to accelerate it any further).

So for anyone sending email to yahoo and wondering why it takes so long for
them to get it, this is why and if you really care about the person you are sending
email to then I would strongly suggest to them to use a better service.

Gmail, Hotmail, MobileMe, and many more exist and do the job in a more
standards conforming manner that doesn’t piss off our server..

That’s all for now.