Mailing List Archive

AnalogX QDNS
Salaam!

For years, I have been using the AnalogX "QuickDNS" (v2.00,
8/12/2000) to build my dns.txt file for Analog. However, with a DNS
file of 850,000 IP addresses, I have run into a problem, and my
solutions have been a bit short. Here is the problem:

Some canonical names are excessively long, and QDNS cannot handle
them; some canonical names contain an asterisk, which seems to cause
other problems; and when attempting to merge new entries, I
occasionally get a "can't read memory at" some address. This always
indicates a series of non-printable characters at the end of one
canonical name, which causes QDNS to stop reading the dns file ~ the
number of "DNS entries loaded" is far short of the entire file, and of
course the resulting new dns.txt file is several megabytes shorter.

So I am now resolving new entries into a temporary dnst.txt file,
which I edit to remove those problematic entries, then merge it with
the main dns.txt file. With a dns.txt file of some 47 megabytes, not
even my metapad text editor can edit the file and successfully save it
to the drive. With the smaller file of new entries, QDNS can handle it.

However, when I resolve a few thousand entries, and have that
dnst.txt file ready to merge, QDNS treats these resolved entries as
unresolved, and does its lookups before adding them to the main
dns.txt file. Usually, it fails to resolve all of them, so that they
do not all get added to the dns.txt file. This remains true no matter
how soon after the original resolution (into the dnst.txt file) QDNS
does its second (unnecessary) set of lookups.

I know a lot of people use QDNS for Analog. Has anyone else
encountered this kind of problem? Two questions:

1. How do I prevent QDNS from attempting to add these bogus
canonical names ~ the too-long names and the names containing
asterisks or unprintable characters ~ to the dns.txt file, or ignoring
them when it encounters the unprintable characters in the dns.txt
file? and

2. How do I make QDNS simply merge the resolved entries in the
temporary dnst.txt file into the main dns.txt file without trying to
resolve them (they're already resolved!!!)?

Or perhaps a third question: Where do I look for answers to these
questions? QDNS is, in my opinion, a marvelous companion to Analog,
of comparable workmanship, but has not been updated since 2000. Is
there a solution for this?

was-salaam,
abujamal

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Re: AnalogX QDNS [ In reply to ]
Hajj abujamal <muslims@muslimamerica.net> wrote:
>
> 1. How do I prevent QDNS from attempting to add these bogus
> canonical names ~ the too-long names and the names containing
> asterisks or unprintable characters ~ to the dns.txt file, or ignoring
> them when it encounters the unprintable characters in the dns.txt
> file? and

Where are these problematical names coming from? Is QDNS getting these names from the DNS server, and writing them into the dns.txt file, and then choking on them later when it tries to read the dns.txt file back, or is it choking on them when it gets the answer back from the DNS server?

(Can you give me one or 2 examples of IP addresses that cause QDNS to choke in this way?)

> 2. How do I make QDNS simply merge the resolved entries in the
> temporary dnst.txt file into the main dns.txt file without trying to
> resolve them (they're already resolved!!!)?

Maybe you don't need to get QDNS to merge the files. A DNS cache file is a fairly simple text file. You should be able to just join multiple small DNS cache files into a single file with the DOS "copy" command (COPy DNS1.txt+DNS2.txt DNS3.txt)

> Or perhaps a third question: Where do I look for answers to these
> questions? QDNS is, in my opinion, a marvelous companion to Analog,
> of comparable workmanship, but has not been updated since 2000. Is
> there a solution for this?

QDNS was written by someone who (as far as I can recall) never contributed to this list (or never identified themselves if they did contribute), and the source was never made available. This is probably as good a place to ask your question as any, but don't expect any definitive answers. It doesn't seem likely that any of the identified bugs in QDNS will ever be fixed at this stage, because the author is the only one who has the source, and he or she doesn't seem to be interested in fixing it.

Aengus


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Re: AnalogX QDNS [ In reply to ]
Salaam!

Aengus wrote:

> Hajj abujamal wrote:
>> 1. How do I prevent QDNS from attempting to add these bogus
>> canonical names ~ the too-long names and the names containing
>> asterisks or unprintable characters ~ to the dns.txt file, or
>> ignoring them when it encounters the unprintable characters
>> in the dns.txt file? and

> Where are these problematical names coming from? Is QDNS getting
> these names from the DNS server, and writing them into the dns.txt
> file, and then choking on them later when it tries to read the
> dns.txt file back, or is it choking on them when it gets the answer
> back from the DNS server?

QDNS gets them from the DNS server, writes them into the dns.txt
file, and then chokes on them later. The unprintable characters are
always three or four characters at the end of what is obviously a
corrupted canonical name.

> (Can you give me one or 2 examples of IP addresses that cause QDNS
to choke in this way?)

20160835 38.118.71.121 *.upiasiaonline.com
18459349 193.225.86.51 *.cicero.itak.sztaki.hu
18459204 202.140.141.30 *.enetmall.com

Those appear to create problems. I also get

The instruction at 0x00402384 referenced memory at 0x6e2e7873.
The memory could not be read.

errors (as I was writing this reply). These appear to be the
end-of-line corruptions. Just now I loaded a dns.txt file containing
853,309 resolved IP addresses ~ QDNS loaded only 718,170, so I checked
the file:

20156554 207.101.74.26
churchilldevelopment-churchilldevelopment-psr2081256.z74-101-207.customer.algx.n4¿ÛC¡3

was the 718,170th entry. It is these that I'd like to eliminate
before they corrupt a dns.txt file. 207.101.74.26 resolves to:

churchilldevelopment-churchilldevelopment-psr2081256.z74-101-207.customer.algx.net
(82 characters) but didn't get into the dns.txt file that way, I don't
know why. Are those last characters unicode or something?

I don't have any more examples of the end-of-line corruptions
because when it occurs, the entire dns.txt file is poisoned and I
delete it, restore an earlier dns.txt file, and start again. The next
time I have a poisoned dns.txt file, I'll save the corrupting line.

>> 2. How do I make QDNS simply merge the resolved entries in the
>> temporary dnst.txt file into the main dns.txt file without trying
>> to resolve them (they're already resolved!!!)?

> Maybe you don't need to get QDNS to merge the files. A DNS cache
file is a fairly simple text file. You should be able to just join
multiple small DNS cache files into a single file with the DOS "copy"
command (COPy DNS1.txt+DNS2.txt DNS3.txt)

Aaah, that works ~ except that the COPY command adds an EOF
character at the end of the new file. QDNS removes it when I "strip
all unresolved" with a command line like:

qdns /D dns.txt /Y 63.135.48.130 /S

and that works. So far.

>> Or perhaps a third question: Where do I look for answers to these
>> questions? QDNS is, in my opinion, a marvelous companion to
>> Analog, of comparable workmanship, but has not been updated since
>> 2000. Is there a solution for this?

> QDNS was written by someone who (as far as I can recall) never
> contributed to this list (or never identified themselves if they did
> contribute), and the source was never made available. This is
> probably as good a place to ask your question as any, but don't
> expect any definitive answers. It doesn't seem likely that any of
> the identified bugs in QDNS will ever be fixed at this stage,
> because the author is the only one who has the source, and he or she
> doesn't seem to be interested in fixing it.

Mark Thompson, of Tempe, Arizona, does not appear to have worked
with the program since 2000. His website offers numerous networking
tools at http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network.htm for
"Everyone," "Power Users," and "Uber-Geeks," most of which I think
I'll download and explore. But it does appear that his interests have
moved to music. I have a phone call in to him, we'll see what comes
of it.

Meanwhile, I'll break up my 47.3 Mb dns.txt file to eliminate that
one line ... and use the DOS copy command.

THANKS!

> Aengus

was-salaam,
abujamal


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Re: AnalogX QDNS [ In reply to ]
Hajj abujamal <muslims@muslimamerica.net> wrote:
> Salaam!
>
> Aengus wrote:
>
>> (Can you give me one or 2 examples of IP addresses that cause QDNS
>> to choke in this way?)
>
> 20160835 38.118.71.121 *.upiasiaonline.com
> 18459349 193.225.86.51 *.cicero.itak.sztaki.hu
> 18459204 202.140.141.30 *.enetmall.com
>
> Those appear to create problems. I also get

Just using a 4 line log file with these addresses (and the one below), QDNS doesn't crash for me, either creating the DNS cache file from scratch, or re-reading it

> The instruction at 0x00402384 referenced memory at 0x6e2e7873.
> The memory could not be read.
>
> errors (as I was writing this reply). These appear to be the
> end-of-line corruptions. Just now I loaded a dns.txt file containing
> 853,309 resolved IP addresses ~ QDNS loaded only 718,170, so I checked
> the file:
>
> 20156554 207.101.74.26
> churchilldevelopment-churchilldevelopment-psr2081256.z74-101-207.customer.algx.n4¿ÛC¡3

On my machine, QDNS resolved this to
20163681 207.101.74.26 churchilldevelopment-churchilldevelopment-psr2081256.z74-
101-207.customer.algx.nö

So it exhibited the same error, but the outcome is slightly different. Perhaps that has something to do with the default Regional and Language settings in the control Panel. (Mine are all set to "English (United States)"). So the crash could be caused by the size of the file, or by the additional characters being generated by QDNS on your machine.

What happens if you create a 1 line log file with just 207.101.74.26 as the address, and run QDNS against it? Does QDNS still crash?

>> Maybe you don't need to get QDNS to merge the files. A DNS cache
>> file is a fairly simple text file. You should be able to just join
>> multiple small DNS cache files into a single file with the DOS "copy"
>> command (COPy DNS1.txt+DNS2.txt DNS3.txt)
>
> Aaah, that works ~ except that the COPY command adds an EOF
> character at the end of the new file. QDNS removes it when I "strip
> all unresolved" with a command line like:
>
> qdns /D dns.txt /Y 63.135.48.130 /S
>
> and that works. So far.

Does Analog care about the presence of the EOF?

Aengus

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