Stardate 20020219.2057

(Engineering log): The problem that hammered me about a month ago and caused me to rebuild my server came back again today, for no obvious reason. Where I should have been able to FTP locally with no difficulty at all, I suddenly could not.

The problem turned out to be a timeout of some kind, and it seems to have happened because something out in network land. I'm using a turnkey server I bought from Cobalt (part of Sun) and it's running Linux. Evidently the default setting for FTP is to do a reverse DNS on the IP from which any session begins, and the Telnet demon does the same. (Like as not it's because they're being logged into some sort of file somewhere.) It was taking an inordinate amount of time for the reverse DNS to take place, and my FTP client here was timing out.

My reader Jerry Hill suggested in my forum (which, perversely, still worked because none of this affects Apache) that I try adding some entries into /etc/hosts for the IPs I'm using, and I did that and now it works great again. (You done good, guy; thanks a lot! If you've got a web site and want it plugged here, you get a freebie. Let me know.)

I assume that this happened today because something changed at whatever DNS it was that my system was trying to access in order to interpret my internal 192.168.*.* addresses. How strange. (Don't tell me that this stuff doesn't run via black magic; I know better.)