Dynamic DNS

Sun, 08 Sep 2002 13:54:01 +0100

John Robb and Terry Frazier have both mentioned dynamic dns recently. This is handy for people of dialup/cable modems as it allows them to keep a DNS entry even though their IP address changes from time to time. I had a go with a company called TZO who offer the same service at a fairly low rate. My Dad just mentioned DtDns to me & they offer this service free.

The only reason I didn't register was that I'm not sure Dynamic DNS will be of use when I buy a cable router. It won't be able to run the dynamic DNS client and my own machine will be using NAT so the IP address won't be valid.

Anyone know of a way around that?

Bad label type blues

Sat, 27 May 2006 22:10:27 +0100

For a few days now I've been having an irritating problem with the Mac. It manifests itself in pages not loading properly in the browser. For example I'll be happily browsing eBay and then, all of a sudden, when I follow a link the page won't load with a message like:

Safari can't open the page “http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/blah"
because it can’t find the server “cgi.ebay.co.uk”.

Can't find cgi.ebay.co.uk? What's up with that? A few retries will get the same response and then, mysteriously, a few seconds to a few minutes later everything will be fine, until the next time.

Then again I seem to see the problem quite a lot when using GMail. During one episode I tried using nslookup to confirm the problem and it revealed something quote odd:

> mail.google.com
;; Got bad packet: bad label type
49 bytes
33 62 80 80 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 00 48 0e cd 13 
6c 06 67 6f 6f 67 6c 65 03 63 6f 6d 00 00 01 00 
01 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 04 11 fe 00 5b c0 
10

I've never seen a bad label type error before. Is this a DNS error? Or something to do with my ADSL modem perhaps (an old WebRamp 600i) which is acting as local DNS proxy?

As you can see, a few seconds (to a few minutes) later all is well again:

> mail.google.com
Server:         192.168.1.1
Address:        192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
mail.google.com canonical name = googlemail.l.google.com.
Name:   googlemail.l.google.com
Address: 72.14.205.83
Name:   googlemail.l.google.com
Address: 72.14.205.19

I seem to see this error only on popular sites like Google/GMail, Amazon, and eBay. But it may be that the problem is intermittent and, since I use those sites a lot, I just haven't noticed it for another site yet.

It's got me baffled and you'll notice that a Google search (when it works) for that bad label type error message doesn't seem to turn up anything relevant. This of course means that probably noboy reading this will have any clue what the problem is...

But if anyone can offer me some advice on this I'd appreciate it. It's not a devastating problem but it is becoming consistently irritating now.

I wonder if it may be related to an occasional problem I've had with lookupd since about 10.4.4 where, every now and again, it will spike up to ~100% CPU utilization and then sit there. Sometimes logging out fixing it, sometimes it doesn't.

I'd really like to get these two ironed out.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on dns

Dynamic DNS

Bad label type blues