Support this website
2013 was a good year in a lot of ways. Here are my personal accomplishments for this year:

==It’s a girl!==

My wife and I had a beautiful daughter together this year.

==Servers updated==

I managed to get better virtual server nodes for hosting my web pages by finally getting two nodes with BuyVM and one node with Crissic. This allows me to have IPv6 for all my web pages, and the server upgrade has made my sites more reliable.

==MaraDNS maintenance==

While I, by and large, no longer actively develop MaraDNS, I still maintain MaraDNS (and its recursor Deadwood) in the following ways:

• I will update the software as needed for the IPv6 transition which should finally become mainstream later on in the 2010s
• I will fix security and other serious bugs in MaraDNS and Deadwood
• I will continue to fix corner cases which cause Deadwood to be unable to resolve a given hostname (as long as said hostname has a real-world example on the Internet)

In 2013, I only had to fix one security issue in Deadwood (be sure to be using MaraDNS 2.0.07d with Deadwood 3.2.03d or a more recent release), but ended up handling three issues causing names to not resolve in Deadwood:

• An unusual corner case where a record started at a particular point in the uncompressed DNS packet: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130320.​html
• When Deadwood receives a name with a different case than the original query sent to Deadwood: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130713.​html
• When a DNS server does not have an IP for its NS records: http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​browse-​source/​stable/​update/​3.​2.​04/​deadwood-​3.​2.​03-​oncetv-​ipn.​net.​patch

In addition, I have improved MaraDNS’ IPv6 support by having the authoritative server include IPv6 glue records for name servers.

Besides that, I didn’t add anything to MaraDNS.

Since I lost a couple of subscribers every time there was a big support thread in the MaraDNS mailing list, I changed the mailing list in to a moderated list where I only announce new MaraDNS releases; MaraDNS support is now available in a special forum I have set up (and heavily moderate to keep it spam and argument free).

I also saved the MaraDNS Wikipedia article by clearly showing that it has generated enough attention in reliable sources to merit a Wikipedia page.

==Other minor geek projects==

I played around with the ancient video game Pitfall to give it different maps: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130617.​html

I finally added an RSS feed to my web pages: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130731.​html

I dealt with one of VirtualBox’s annoying bugs: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130826.​html

I made yet another implementation of SipHash: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20131006.​html

I updated my TinyOVZ Busybox-based virtual machine for OpenVZ: http://samiam.org/TinyOVZ

I converted the 7x14 font included with X-Windows in to a Windows font that works both in PuTTY and in MSYS: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20131215.​html

==Other accomplishments==

I have had a storage locker in the US to store some of my things while I lived in Mexico. After not even opening the locker for six years (since it was out of town), I finally emptied it out.

I joined a gym again.

I converted my old Windows XP laptop in to a Linux server running multiple virtual machines via OpenVZ.

2013 was a good year but I know 2014 will be an even better year!

To post a comment about this blog entry, go to the forum (self-signed https). New accounts may post once I approve the account.