2004-04-30 #1

DNS and/or VPN hell

Back in February or sometime thereabouts, head office changed their internal IP space. This is due to a complex network infrastructure at the computer center which included said IP space as part of its larger supernet, and a dumb SuperStack3 firewall which can't deal with an external subnet which is part of an internal supernet's address space.

One run-on sentance later, this affected my VPN connection to head office.

At some point, I told my network that addresses in the head office's DNS space to resolve using the internal name servers, ie through the VPN to head office. Which means that now that said VPN is down, I can no longer resolve head office's addresses by name. Because I can't figure out where the damn setting change was.

Periodically, I do something stupid like try to look up something in head office's namespace in Mozilla. And then I compound this problem by cancelling the lookup. For some reason, this sequence of events kills Mozilla's name resolution process dead, making the current instance of Mozilla worthless as a browser. This has been a problem in the RedHat 9 Mozilla, and the last two Ximian Mozilla(s).

Galeon does not appear to suffer from this fault.

In fact, the only think preventing a wholesale conversion to Galeon is the inability to import my pre-existing Mozilla bookmarks. I especially like the toolbar integration of Google search fields. This is a much better way to do it than the sidebar method Mozilla uses (although occasionally it is nice to see the search results stay sticky in Mozilla's sidebar as you plough through the results). Overall, though, I like the toolbar approach, since when you are not actively using the Mozilla search sidebar it is annoying.

I think that I will try setting up my internal DNS server as a slave to the head office namespace. That should make it easier to do lookups.