utilities

Many times it happens that we are configuring network on a newly installed machine and forget what the DNS server addresses are.. or when your ISP's dns server just doesnt work.. If you find yourself in such situations frequently then its time you remember these easy to recall public dns servers.

• 4.2.2.1 - to - 4.2.2.6 (Verizon)
• 198.6.1.1 - to - 198.6.1.6 (GTI Internet)
• 128.100.100.128 (University of Toronto)
• 198.6.1.1 (UUNet)

Though i should add a note of caution, use these dns servers to get to the net, search for your ISP's dns servers and add them instead. Its really not a good idea to trample on someone else's bandwidth.. Also while using a third party DNS server, one must understand that its very easy for them to redirect icicibank.com to any server they wish

Its also a good idea to install bind locally to get out of such situations.. in which case the only IP to be added is 127.0.0.1

With the winter season coming up try this if you are feeling cold and are working on a laptop.

$ openssl speed

Openssl is a nice way of benchmarking your processor's performance. It tries to calculate the number of mathematical calculations (md5, sha, aes, blowfish et. al hashes) your processor can do in given time. the higher number of calculations, the better And yes its terribly heats up your CPU at the same time..

If your CPU hasnt heated up yet then try running several openssl benchmarks at the same time.. write a shell script like this...

#!/bin/bash
openssl speed &
openssl speed &
...
...
[repeat 20 lines]

Right now above script is running on the new proliant server and its fans are making such a loud noise as its benchmarking

Due to some freaky thought, lately I started feeling Ubuntu is getting too boring these days.. everything works just like that out of the box. So I downloaded FreeBSD 6.1 CDs the day before and tried to install it today. I was thinking for sometime if in this upcoming version my wifi works out of the box then maybe i'll migrate to FreeBSD..

So there i burnt the three iso files on cds and rebooted from first cd. Everything is fine till i come to partitioning.. err, what was the device id of primary partition i kept for freebsd? Somehow i managed to figure out what it is..

Installation, hardware configuration goes smoothly.. but the most challenging part of installation is yet to come .. I select packages i want to be installed(All Packages and their dependencies).. Insert CD-1 to continue... » i change cds » after sometime, Insert CD-2 to continue... » i change cds » after sometime, Insert CD-1 to continue.. ».. [repeat that 20+ times] » dependency failed so not installing package pango-foo.bar, libfoo, gtkbar.. blah... » arrrgghh.. » I press hard reboot for 10 seconds...

Ok, so freebsd installation was fun.. maybe i want to wait for 6.2 release..