As has been the case with me over the past two years I’m once again in a rented apartment at the mercy of someone else’s Wi-Fi with no resulting control or access to the router. It’s all somewhat limiting should I wish to dabble in any external DynDNS malarkey (which I do) but I get by SSH-ing around the LAN to the wondrous little Dell Mini 9″ and it’s certainly a notch up from running a virtual machine on the MacBook Air, in fact it’s actually a most useful set up and a really don’t know how I ever managed before.

The landlord here has been most accommodating and credit to him has tried to arrange my own connection, however due to a six week string of banal events revolving around the comms guys continually turning up at No.4 instead of No.11 (me) we’ve given up and canceled the request, fair enough, I’ll save €15 a month and the knock on effect of doing so has stuck another feather in the Mini’s cap for use as a DNS caching unit.

For those who aren’t sure what I’m on about basically a DNS server is a special “network” computer which translates IP addresses to recognisable names (and vice versa), i.e when you type www.google.com into Firefox a combination of DNS servers translate behind the scenes and deliver the search page to you from the actual IP address of Google (66.102.9.105), the server also remembers addresses it’s visited and keeps a record of them to speed up delivery for future requests.

The pipe to the outside world here tops out at just under 2MB (on a good day) however it’s connected through the pool.einsundeins.de domain which isn’t the most dynamic, couple that with a stretched Wi-Fi signal and things become a touch laborious at certain times of the day, so I thought I’d try a bit of local DNS caching to see if I could help things along.

Your computer at home (or at work) invariably makes it’s “DNS” calls to your ISP’s servers out on the internet, this process is relatively quick but obviously not as quick as if it were pinging a unit sat on your local network and with Ubuntu this is very easy to set up using something called BIND9 (Berkley Internet Naming Daemon Version 9). By default Bind is configured to act as a caching server however you need to tweak a few settings so it’s relative to itself and knows where to go to look up un-cached domain names it doesn’t know about (forwarders).

The first thing to do is fix the IP of the unit you’ll be using from DHCP to static, once done install BIND..

sudo apt-get install bind9

..next type..

sudo nano /etc/bind/named.conf.options

..uncomment the “forwarders” section and add the following (I use OpenDNS IP’s, OpenDNS is superb)..

forwarders {
208.67.220.220;
208.67.222.222;
};

..save the file.

Now we need to edit the /etc/resolv.conf file so it knows where to find the “namerservers” (including itself), at the command line type..

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

..and add/make sure the file reads as follows..

nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 206.67.222.222

..close the file and save then restart BIND..

sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart

That’s it, you’re done.

To test delivery times open a terminal and dig the URL of a website you haven’t visited before, for example..

dig www.ubuntu4business.com

Check the query time then execute the command again, see the difference? Admittedly it’s only milliseconds we’re dealing with here but you WILL notice a boost.

The beauty of this solution is that it provides a browser boost to any type or any amount of computers on your LAN, it’s a great quick, easy and cheap solution for both home and business, just point all primary DNS entries at your new caching unit’s IP address and away you go. My IMAP mail account performance has been painful for the past few months with continuing hangups ranging from folders not displaying to general time outs but now it’s happy and snappy again.

Due to the lack of an OSX version for the (apparently) swish and whizzy new browser from Google (Google ‘Chrome’) I thought I’d give the multi processing session concept a tryout for myself by installing the beta of Stainless on to the MacBook Air.

Stainless started out merely as a technology demo for Mesa Dynamics however due to it’s rapidly growing fan base and corresponding list of evolving features it’s continuing on toward a fully fledged release (V1.0). The present version (0.6) is still only at beta development stages however it’s already offering some nice touches above and beyond Chrome itself, to quote from the site -

“A prime example is parallel sessions, which allow you to log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time. This new technology is woven throughout Stainless, from the private cookie storage system, to session-aware bookmarks that remember the session in which they were saved”

Most useful, especially for those of us with a few Twitter accounts

Stainless is most obviously still in the development stages with no RSS menus or further extended browsing capability, however it does already have one very nice feature which virtually (for me anyway) negates the enhancements of missing technicality, namely the icon driven ‘Bookmark Shelf’ (see header image). I absolutely love it, just drag the web icon (favicon) over from the selected page into the leftside window strip, quick, easy and a nice simple alternative to those endless drop down lists of cascading bookmarks. I used to think the tab bar in Firefox was a cool idea but this takes it up (or sideways) to another level of lateral simplicity.

I’m a huge fan of graphics over lists and personally find it much easier to zip through visual recognition formats rather than by searching text, is that the same for everyone else I wonder? And if so what does it tell us about ourselves and the way *business* predominantly works with information? Take CD’s for example (yes, I hear some people do actually still own vast libraries of this antiquated physical media, however didn’t we all at some stage?), the question is how did (or do) you organise your collections? Alphabetically? Or further split down into genre? Such granularity always seemed too labour intense for me so I dropped into lining them up by colour, i.e starting with all white spines, moving into cream, to light yellow, to orange, to shades of red and flowing on into each other as the hue dictated ending with black (you get the idea?). I always knew the colour of the box and the corresponding album art (see previous post ‘Listen in Colour‘) so found it an incredibly quick method of finding the CD I wanted to listen to, not only that but there was a double bonus of the collection looking groovy and colourful racked up across the wall. Leading on from this is (I think) an interesting point regarding the inherent facility for colour tagging files and folders under the AppleMac operating systems of new and old, something which I believe says untold amounts about the Apple vs *PC* mindset.

Anyway, yes, my colour matched image freindly brain really rates the Bookmark Shelf concept and I can’t believe nobody’s thought of it before, or have they? Have I just been stuck in Firefox drop down/tab world and missed a whole new area of simple clickability? I know Safari 4 offers coverflow and the eye popping panorama view of the ‘Favourite Sites’ window but even that involves an extra click or two (clicks are a valuable commodity) and still lists the site description as text in a space hogging sidebar. The only drawback of course is that (as yet) there’s no specifically legitimate reason for every site to have it’s own bespoke web icon (although I think they should, and any site worth it’s salt actually already does) and as such you could just end up with a few generic globes. The site name does pop into view at mouse over, and you can easily drop a custom image in with a quick right click & ‘configure’ so I suppose it’s no real biggie to get things looking swish and organised if you only have a few dozen main faves (like me).

I believe it’s worth the extra effort just to fill in a few blanks for the resulting overall effect and I’m looking forward to seeing how slick the finished version is.

Download Stainless HERE

So then, IP addressing.

I discovered a *supposed* web facing router the other day which was allocated a 10.***.****.**** address, as the above table shows this is one of three schemas allocated for private network use only. If you check your home computers IP I’ll wager a pound to a penny it’ll start with 192 (if not you’re flying without a safety net….go and buy a NAT router immediately), and I did say HOME computer by the way, business networks of any size invariably run on the 10.***.***.*** schema which, as shown, offers huge flexibility with over 16 million separate IP addresses.

If you do have a router (and I hope that’s the case, especially if you’re running Windows XP, although if you haven’t, and are, my guess would be that XP perhaps isn’t running too well, if at all), and if you know how to access the router config & admin (invariably just type 192.168.0.1 in a browser, or whatever IP number the gateway is set to) you’ll see it’s allocated IP number, that’s it’s *web facing* IP, and here’s the deal – web facing IP numbers are unique and routable across and around the WWW, this is obviously necessary for it all to work and for you to be able to find Facebook or eBay or whatever it is you while away the hours with (see DNS), but also useful the other way round should you wish to dabble with home hosting or other incoming bits and bobs (enter ‘port forwarding’…..although perhaps in another post).

The router in question from the other day is obviously sectioned into a private network, which is something I’ve never come across for a service provided to a home user from an ISP, quite bizarre. Unlike private IP numbers (you can do what the fuck you like behind your own router & firewall) web facing IP’s do cost money, and this is Costa Rica, which is probably as much of an explanation as is perhaps needed (if you know the place), internet access here is *interesting* at the best of times (again – see DNS, open DNS is a no brainer here), I’d dearly love to get a proper look at their setup to see exactly what they’re up to, I really would.

I feel quite lucky to be getting a steady 1mb-ish in the cabina but it’s mainly down to powerful wi-fi reception from the MacBook Air (yep, another tick for the Air), Lesley however has to surf outside as her little 12″ Powerbook hasn’t got the range, not a real problem until the afternoon when it gets too hot for outdoor computing, and from where I’m sat here I can see her and Marjory both surfing away in their makeshift internet cafe (behind a sheet hung from the washing line in the outdoor kitchen…!), it’s most amusing, I can just see their feet and hear the noise of keyboard tapping.

I fixed Marjories laptop for her last week and she’s over the moon after literally 4 months of no communication and various half arsed local repair jobs, it’s now flying along, solid as a rock running the ‘special’ version of Windows XP I use  for my poor  mis-guided Windows clients, I surprised myself too and even fixed the previously non-functional internal DVD drive using a somewhat left-field method of persuasion, I always seem to get better results ‘outside’ standard procedure, I should feel at home here then.