Four Island

Ooh, here we go with a series of coincidences that happen to make a problem, just like the Rubiwin Glitches. What do you get if you have Ubuntu, BIND and no internet access? A 50MB log file full of entries like below, of course!

too many timeouts resolving 'weather.noaa.gov/A' (in '.'?): disabling EDNS

Nah, I didn't find it that funny either. In fact, along with my Apache error.log of death, mah log files were spiralling out of control because they like to repeat cyclic data out of order so they cannot be shortened into:

last message repeated 303 times

Something had to be done. At first, I hadn't a clue why the negative my computer was attempting to access a .gov domain over three hundred times a second. Was it a conspiracy?

Um, no, probably not. I finally remembered that Ubuntu comes with a handy weather lookup feature in the time panel. It was constantly attempting to access weather.noaa.gov--where it, apparently, got it's weather data--and because I don't have internet access, it was resolving through MY BIND server instead of a root server's. And since I don't have any entries for weather.noaa.gov, it failed. And computers take the mantra "If at first you don't succeed, try and try again" VERY seriously.

I thought, "Oh, okay, I'll just go disable the weather thing." Wasn't that easy. I disabled it, but something was still querying the remote server. I then came up with a cheat: I'd add weather.noaa.gov to my BIND server! Then, it'd resolve, but nothing would come of it so everything could be the same just without the 50MB log file!

YAY! There's that done. Now I just have to figure out what the negative the below message means in Apache's error.log:

[debug] mod_deflate.c(619): [client 127.0.0.1] Zlib: Compressed 16400 to 4363 : URL /index.php