Mac OS DNS bug

I had a bit of an interesting experience the other day while attempting to fail over our Jabber server from our production site to the DR site.

Our two servers each have their own A records in DNS with a TTL of 3600 seconds (1 hour). This long timeout is fine since the IP address of the actual server never really changes.

Access to the service is instead provided by a CNAME record which points to one of those two hostnames. The TTL of the CNAME record is 60 seconds, allowing us to quickly fail over between the two sites as needed.

So the time came, and I had to perform a fail over. I updated the CNAME, and in order to prevent users from being unable to connect, I waited 60 seconds before shutting down the old server and starting up the new one.

From there things went bad. I tried to access the admin console, and failed. I tried to log into the Jabber server, and failed. Finally I hit the admin console through the A record instead of the CNAME, and found that other users had seamlessly failed over.

After a bit of testing I determined that my Linux box and my Windows box both worked fine. The only problem was the Mac that I was making the change from. For some reason, the Mac was holding on to the old IP address.

After some testing, and confirmation from other individuals on their Macs, I think I know what was going on. Using dscacheutil -cachedump -entries, I inspected the local resolver cache.

Here's what I found:

Category Best Before Last Access Hits Refs TTL Neg DS Node
---------- ------------------ ------------------ -------- ------ -------- ----- ---------
Host 01/28/09 21:07:02 01/28/09 20:18:35 10 4 3600
Key: h_aliases:openfire.domain.fake. ipv4:1
Key: h_aliases:openfire.domain.fake ipv4:1
Key: h_name:server1.domain.fake ipv4:1

This appears to be reporting that the local resolver cached the server1.domain.fake DNS record, and set an expiration date of the record for "01/28/09 21:07:02". openfire.domain.fake was then set as an alias for that record without retaining its own TTL. This would certainly explain the behavior that I saw.

So it seems to Mac OS X may be incompatible with a fairly common DNS failover technique. I filed a bug, so it'll be interesting to see how long it takes before Apple gets around to fixing it.

Home Media Server

I'm a bit of a media buff. I own several hundred DVDs, and I'm guessing well over 1000 cds.

Like the rest of the known world, I solved the CD problem years ago. I ripped all of my CDs, and I store them in a few places including my iPod and my home media server. Early on I ripped in ogg format, but quickly regretted it when I bought a Phat Box media player for my car. By the time they supported Ogg format, I had moved onto an iPod.

Eventually I started buying music from the iTunes Music Store since it was so much easier than CDs, and I continued until I discovered the Amazon MP3 Store. Buying in mp3 format instead of AAC is so much easier to deal with, not to mention the lack of DRM.

Recently I read about Sockso. Sockso provides me with a simple web interface for streaming music off of my server so I can listen from work without having everything on local disk. Considering that my music collection is 58GB these days, it certainly saves me some space. Unfortunately Sockso does not support AAC format at this point, so I'm kind of out of luck on my iTunes media (even the non-DRM files).

Recently I started trying to tackle the DVD issue as well. I have a DVD changer, but its just kind of clumsy. It attempts to detect the name of movies from the disc, but rarely succeeds. You can attach a PS2 keyboard and type them in manually, but I eventually had to move the player which required removing the discs (and losing the inputted data).

So I thought I'd apply the same techniques to my movies. I used Handbrake to rip a number of movies and copy them onto my server as well. From there I can copy them into iTunes to watch on my computer, my iPod or transfer to my AppleTV (I apparently buy too much Apple gear).

Most of my media is on my file server which runs linux, so I wanted to see if I can get away without running iTunes. My first option was pyTivo. Its an interesting project. Its a python script that you point to your movie collection. It performs the necessary UDP broadcasts in order to announce your movie share on the network for your TiVo to see, and then converts the movie on demand to a format that TiVo can display properly. pyTivo works pretty well, but the code is in flux, and I'm not sure how much I want to trust it.

My latest try was XBMC. Its a rather nice media player that was created for the original XBox. These days it has also been ported to run on Windows, Linux, the Mac, and AppleTV. It can easily be installed on the AppleTV using ATV USB Creator.

XBMC can recieve a stream from a Universal Plug'n'Play Media Server. In my case I used MediaTomb since it was available straight from Ubuntu. I'm not sure I'd suggest it due to the lack of access control. For now, I'm fine just running it bound to my local network only.

I'm not sure I'm really happy with how all of this is working, but its still a work in progress.