[X4U] Re: Leopard Issues - Some Responses

[Stroller]

On 5 Dec 2007, at 05:26, Jon wrote:
> ...The last posters are pretty convincing that Verizon is doing the
> dirty deed & diverting invalid urls to feed their click revenue.
>
> But that doesn't fit the facts that I observe and have reported.
> ....
> I launched Firefox on each machine. This is a problem, because the
> version on the Powerbook (Tiger) isn't the current version for  
> Leopard, and
> when I copied that version over to the MacBook, it upgraded  
> automatically.

Just because 10.4 and 10.4 are behaving differently, doesn't mean  
it's all Apple's fault. I think that was your original assumption &  
that you understand otherwise now.

On computer functions there are often multiple error conditions. When  
we talk about DNS we're talking about commands which ask a computer  
to look up the IP address associated with a domain name - there might  
be an error type for the server to say "address doesn't exist",  
another for it to say "I'm not responsible for that address" or "I'm  
only allowed to talk to my ISP's customers" and others for your  
computer to say "the server didn't respond in good time" and so on.

Under 10.3 Apple may well have responded one way to one of these  
error messages and chosen to respond differently in 10.4 - that  
doesn't mean the new behaviour is wrong, it could just be that it  
substantiates Verizon's incorrect configuration as it didn't (to you)  
before.

It seems pretty clear (to me) that the correct behaviour at an o/s  
level is for the host "jr" to be "not found". I'd expect a simple web- 
browser should return a "404" error or similar in response to this  
(like they all did in the old days) but as browsers have become more  
sophisticated they have been designed to produce more "user friendly"  
results. This difference is illustrated by the way Internet Explorer  
goes to the Windows Live Search results for "jr", whereas another  
browser adds the "www." and ".com". A search page might actually be  
more useful in many cases than adding the "www." and ".com" - if  
you'd typed "ib" or "ib.com" instead of "ibm", for example.

> I ran the port and dig commands, but I don't understand enough  
> about them
> yet. (I wish the man pages were not so lengthy and not so cryptic.)

Well, the great thing about commands in a terminal window is that you  
can copy & paste them into emails to show us the results they gave  
and allow people to explain them for you.

man pages tend to be actually really good & useful, but unfortunately  
it's a acquired skill learning how to read them. man pages are long  
because they're comprehensive and (generally) cover everything; they  
have a summary section, often have examples towards the end and not  
only is each flag explained in detail but the "Synopsis" section  
which explains how those flags can be used in different ways (eg:  
compare "dig [@server] ..." with "dig [global-queryopt...]") are  
consistent. I'm not criticising at all your inability to read them,  
because I sympathise with that a great deal, and remember how  
difficult I found it some years ago - I'm just saying they're that  
way for a reason. Now I wouldn't have them any other way, as I can  
often glance at a man page & get the information I require from it  
very quickly indeed (the exception to this is often when a particular  
program severely depreciates its man page for a GNU info version).

Stroller.