for keeping track of my digital experiments

Surprising, never knew that Comcast filters out email from IP addresses without PTR records. I mean I am able to setup SPF records, but that’s about it, unless I lease another VPS or dedicated box and setup my own dns servers so I can run domain keys.

Connected to 76.96.62.116 but greeting failed.
Remote host said: 554 IMTA22.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net comcast 65.254.216.210 Comcast requires that all mail servers must have a PTR record with a valid Reverse DNS entry. Currently your mail server does not fill that requirement. For more information, refer to: http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18784
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Well that sucks, I just sent off a notice to the Amerihosting guys. I wonder what they’ll think? I nabbed the following off of experts-exchange.com (excerpt from the user called bluetab). (Did you know that if you are using Firefox on experts-exchange.com you don’t have to register or pay? You can just scroll to the bottom and read the answers.)

I used zoneedit to create RDNS records for my IP address block and it worked great. It was just a pain to get it setup.
We created a record in ZoneEdit. The IP block has to be formatted as such: XX.XXX.XXX.XXX-XX where the -XX represents the subnet masks /29 for example. After ZoneEdit assigned us name servers we had to send a request back to ATT (our T1 provider). The email basically told ATT to change the nameservers for our IP block.
“We are requesting a change for reverse DNS zone delegation.
Please change the DNS servers for DSE IP block XX.XXX.XXX.XXX-XX on Circuit ID DHEC-XXXXXX to:
ns12.zoneedit.com
ns14.zoneedit.com”

So it can be done! I just hope it works with a single IPv4 address …

I am currently working on a ticketing system, built off of osTicket. I needed a way to notify support staff or system administrators quickly. Why not via text message? Incoming tickets or invoices are taken care of through osTicket, and all I have to do it add in a couple of mail hooks to text message. What I found interesting, is the relative ease with which text messages can be sent to cell phones. As long as you now the person’s carrier (T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon), and the number it is just like sending a regular email. Here is an example Text Message PHP script.

I was originally looking around for a preexisting methodology of peer to peer networking that would suit my upcoming game engine. It needed to be able to function without a central server, have low peer lookup times, and the network had to be resilient to outages. As usual I was sidetracked by interesting forms of peer to peer architectures. I found two interesting articles which I shall highlight.

Overnet
I discovered the Overnet two years too late. It was an interesting lead, a preexisting implementation of DHT methodology, combined with the now defunct eDonkey network. The Overnet was a true serverless network. Nodes that wanted to connect would query a preexisting peer list or get new initial peers via the eDonkey net. The Overnet-ish system is still in use today, but for other things than file sharing.

Storm botnet
One of the most prevalent uses of the Overnet still in use today, is the Storm botnet. It is a remotely-controlled network of “zombie” computers (or “botnet”) that has been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam (Wikipedia). The size of it is staggering, with conservative estimates at 160,000 to a more agreed upon 1 million. The crazy part is the amount of bandwidth that 1 million geo-diverse DSL lines could throw at a host. 1 million computers * a mid-range DSL line (256kbps) = 244.14 Gbps = a whole lot of bandwidth. I am not really scared, because I don’t pick fights with multinational spam corporations. What I find amazing is how peer to peer architectures can scale so much.