procmail
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Re: pm-doc

2002-03-20 10:19:36
At 13:36 2002-03-20 +0000, Nancy McGough did say:
Maybe the person who did not see the problem was accessing a
local cached copy of the site?

I just now cleared my cache (disk and memory), and there's no difference - procmail comes up as expected. As it turns out, it isn't browser cache that is at the root of this anyway (telnet works as well, and there's NO cache or proxy going on there).

I shelled to a remote system (which is in Norway, I'm in California), and performed a dig. I did the same locally on one of my servers as well.

As I mentioned yesterday - www.procmail.org is cname to www.gac.edu.

here, www.gac.edu is cname to lunen.gac.edu (138.236.128.17), but from my remote server, the dig results in a cname to zeme.gac.edu (138.236.128.37). i.e. externally to the procmail site, the gac.edu site has changed, and with it, the server IT is cnamed to, which in turn affects procmail.org.

So, it would seem that the fix might be for Philip to change the CNAME to the specific gac.edu server (that being lunen.gac.edu), or even to set it as an A record instead (though I'd check with the gac.edu personnel to ensure that they're not about to pull the plug on the old server). I've resent a separate copy of this message to him in the hopes that he'll spot it.


DNS is coming up as ns1-ns3.gac.edu for mine which works, and several disparate named servers where it doesn't (though two of the three have the same IPs as my set). My TTLs are at about 2d3h20m, whereas the remote server sees 2d even. (i.e. I have DNS from a valid lookup, then something was changed, and a fresh lookup comes up bad).

You can work around the problem easily enough: in your hosts file (either in /etc/hosts on unix, or in /windows/hosts (whatever specific windows path your installation of windows uses), and add:

138.236.128.17          www.procmail.org

then hit the site (possibly close your web browser entirely before doing so in case your browser caches hostname resolutions).

$ nslookup
> server ns1.gac.edu
> set type=soa
> www.procmail.org
Server:  ns1.gac.edu
Address:  138.236.128.18

www.procmail.org        canonical name = www.gac.edu
www.gac.edu     canonical name = zeme.gac.edu
gac.edu
        origin = solen.gac.edu
        mail addr = hostmaster.gac.edu
        serial = 200203191
        refresh = 3600 (1H)
        retry   = 3600 (1H)
        expire  = 10800 (3H)
        minimum ttl = 3600 (1H)


Note that the serial changed yesterday (or the day before, depending on where you are). The same thing applies to www.gac.edu. Somebody probably came through and did some "housecleaning" in DNS. Those of you who don't refer to the procmail site frequently enough didn't have the pre-change DNS data - you got the fresh resolution of www.gac.edu.


You could confirm the actual procmail host by using telnet:

$ telnet 138.236.128.17 80
GET / HTTP/1.0
host: www.procmail.org


(followed by one blank line). You'll receive the raw HTML of the procmail homepage, which will scroll by, but the final paragraph starts with "Bug reports should be sent to". When you see that working, you can then do the above hosts file change, and hit it normally until the DNS issue is resolved, when you can undo the procmail host tweak.

Note that neither procmail.org _mail_ or _ftp_ is affected -- just the website.

---
 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

 Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.

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