DNS.. depend on 'em

In More ways malware damages internet infrastructure: DNS servers, Justin touches on the problems malware cause to local DNS servers and suggests people use the root servers directly. I had to do just that because the dns server on my dsl router is crap and would keep dying trying to talk to IOLBB’s server. I installed BIND as a cahing nameserver and everything worked fine.
Later I found 194.145.128.1 is an IOL dns server I can use but at least I know it’s easy to setup a DNS server on my machine.
God help us if a tool came out for every Windows owner to query the root servers easily. *gulp*

Debian Sarge, PHP4 and Apache2.. why do you persecute me?

Oh FFS! Has anyone had a problem with Apache2 and PHP4 on Debian Sarge/Testing? I have a stock install of it with nothing unusual AFAICT but Firefox keeps trying to download and save php files instead of processing them. All the config files seem to be correctly set up. Files in mods-enabled/ are fine.
Why am I upset? I added the wp-newblog.php to WPMU SVN tonight, imported a chunk of code from install.php so it’s a one-step process, but I can’t test this thing to see if it works! It’s here as a WPMU snapshot but it won’t work out of the box. It needs an entry in .htaccess first, and bug fixing.

I’m off to relax, it’s been a long day.. zzzz

Much Later… I finally got it working again. I tried dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin but it didn’t update the config file with this error:

Not replacing deleted config file /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf

Following the clues from here I did the following:

apt-get remove –purge libapache2-mod-php4
apt-get remove –purge apache2
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php4 phpmyadmin

PHPMyAdmin now works fine, and hopefully wpmu will too!

Can you hear me? Ping? Linux, ALSA, Via 82xx and 7.1 Surround Sound

I’ve finally got some sort of surround sound going, but only by clicking a “duplicate front” button in alsamixer. There are still 3 speakers that I can’t hear a peep from!
It wasn’t plain sailing in Windows either! For an age I couldn’t hear anything from the back-speakers but after replacing the 3->4 cable that came with the speakers with an old 3->3 cable plus another, it worked. I’ll look at it later again.
Here’s some links for reference: