I spent a chunk of this weekend preparing a mirror for a high loadenvironment. The mirror only needs to serve a couple of largevideo clips , but they're going to be linked from a high traffic website , so we expect a lot of (simultaneous)connections and a lot of outgoing bandwidth.

I made a generic mirror url, using a new hostname that I had to put intoa new sub-zone in our DNS . Right now it has two A records, each with a five minute TTL

Hotmail had an amazingly good week this time around:

• 5 messages accepted.
• 2 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• no messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 6 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• only 1 message refused due to the origin IP address being in the CBL(and now in the SBL, as SBL34115 ).

Muting the happiness is the fact that the one CBL-rejected messagewas from a sympatico.ca address, and several

One thing I did today was set up DNS for a hostname that we may needto re-point elsewhere very rapidly. This caused me to realize somethingimportant:

Setting low TTLs doesn't mean squat if you can't cause secondaries toreload on command.

Low TTLs mean that people will re-query A records frequently, but thatdoesn't help me change where the traffic is going if my secondarieshaven't updated to my new set of A records. Unfortunately, none of thesecondaries for

Every so often, I run into web design trends that I simply don'tunderstand. Since I've already grumbled about small font sizes , today's contestant is the mysterious case of thevanishing links.

Technically they haven't vanished. Instead they've carefully beengiven a colour that is almost exactly the same as the regular textcolour. Sometimes even exactly the same as the regular text colour.Ironically, in this situation the 'click here' style of link textactually becomes good, because