YWGAV

Today was a big day for me. Today is the day that I finally got rid of the cable company.Comcast has been a pain to deal with for a long time. Their customer service was poor, the regularly upped their pricing and I just couldn’t take it any more. So, when I found out that AT&T’s U-Verse service was finally available in my area I was quick to sign up. Today was Install Day.

For a little over a month now I’ve been running Leopard server on my XServe. I’m using it as my gateway machine and have a variety of services running on it. Chief among those services is Open Directory, which serves the portable home directory I use on my Macbook Pro but also serves network home directories for my other macs and windows machines. Throughout the time I’ve been running it I’ve become well acquainted with it’s little bugs, as well as a few major ones.

First we’ve got the DNS admin panel in Server Admin. There appears to be next to no input validation – despite the fact that certain input characters WILL cause DNS to stop working properly (and in fact will prevent it from reloading data, will make your zone information disappear and generally cause a whole slew of other weird problems.) It also gives no indication that stuff isn’t working – you can start the service and it’s status shows as if everything were OK – the only way to diagnose that there even IS a problem is to watch the logs with verbose logging turned on.

I wrote not long ago on my personal blog, Missing Link, about my recent woe’s with Comcast’s broadband internet service. It was enough to make me want to do nothing short of get rid of comcast at any cost. I was pleasantly surprised to find that AT&T is finally offering UVerse service here in my area. While I may not exactly be a fan of AT&T (as a company), they are the only alternative to Comcast. My friend Trevor already has UVerse and says that, while it has some areas that need work, it’s pretty cool. I guess I will find out soon enough, eh?

Yes, it’s true – I’m starting another blog. This one, actually. While I generally don’t mind writing about technical things on my blog I realized that the majority of my posts lately there have been of a rather technical nature. Since most of my readership there doesn’t really care that much about technical matters I decided I would split off the techie stuff into it’s own blog.