OT Internal Idenbreasty Change, and a Warning

I hope this gets through, but in any event somebody out there's getting real cute, and there's no real reason for it.

Somebody registered 'athghost7038suus.net' with dotster (it wasn't me). I suppose a dumb crawler-bot finally went through a newsspool, and slurped up anything in a post even remotely looking like an email address. If this happens again I may have to use an invalid .tld internally. I may do so anyway; I don't think bind-named particularly cares.

At least, I *hope* it was a dumb crawler-bot...

It's a *very* stupid DNS system, too -- anything I throw at it gets resolved into the same IP address (as opposed not exist'). The odd thing is that a reverse IP lookup points to somewhere in onlinehome-server.com.

$ hostx www.athghost7038suus.net www.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.106 www.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.102 $ hostx silly.athghost7038suus.net silly.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.106 silly.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.102 $ hostx fnorglefinger.athghost7038suus.net fnorglefinger.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.106 fnorglefinger.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.102 $ hostx neener.neener.arbitrarily.long.weener.athghost7038suus.net neener.neener.arbitrarily.long.weener.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.102 neener.neener.arbitrarily.long.weener.athghost7038suus.net A 82.165.238.106 $ hostx 82.165.238.106 Name: u15184474.onlinehome-server.com Address: 82.165.238.106

$ hostx 82.165.238.102 Name: u15180124.onlinehome-server.com Address: 82.165.238.102

$ hostx u15184474.onlinehome-server.com u15184474.onlinehome-server.com A 82.165.238.106 $ hostx u15180124.onlinehome-server.com u15180124.onlinehome-server.com A 82.165.238.102

At this point it's more an annoyance than a hindrance. 'whois' indicates the registration happened on July 28, and I happened to notice it by pure luck.

My internal network, of course, had a number of references to the old name (including .bashprofile). I'm hoping I got them cleaned out.

I've already made the mistake of trying to connect to this character's port 119 (mostly because I hadn't changed my hostname to the new scheme yet). So now he knows I have slrnpull. (So do a lot of other people. BFHD: (a) it's firewalled, (b) it's popular. slrn, that is, not my newsserver. :-) )

On Windows this would admittedly be less of a problem, though the good news is that I could accomplish this idenbreasty change on Linux *without a reboot*.

But that doesn't make it less annoying. :-P :-)

ObGrump: Grump!

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.