Hinky’s Proxy Obsession

Early this morning all of the updates just STOPPED.

The page was getting refreshed on schedule but nothing new was getting added. When I got home after slaving away all day in the salt mines, the VM that runs the project was choking on its own puke. It was starved for memory and unresponsive. I had to hit the Virtual Big Red Button to get it back. I rebooted it and took a nap.

When I woke up it was doing it again but it wasn’t dead yet.

I killed a lot of garbage database processes. More popped up so I killed those. Then more, until it went back to normal. Then I ran the process manually to see WTF was going on.

As it happens, my ISP has decided to be “helpful”. They have re-hacked their DNS servers to return their own search page whenever a DNS lookup SERVFAILs. This makes my scripts go nuts.

I have one or two Web sites that disappeared after the shutdown of ESTdomains in November. I keep them in the mix because I’m hoping against hope they’ll be back again some day. When the script runs across them it expects to timeout, and not get a “helpful” search page. Since it doesn’t timeout it chews on the nonsense from the search page.

Forever.

The database never got updated (nothing there anyway), process upon process went into forever-loops, and eventually killed the whole system.

Anyway, that’s all fixed now. The 10PM run should have a lot of new proxies, and I’m seriously considering running my own damned DNS server.