BSNL New year gift – Github DNS lookup failed

I still remember the days when Facebook went down for an hour or two in the evening, and everybody lost their minds, while some predicted the impending apocalypse.

But I’m not on Facebook anymore. I’ll do a separate post on the why(s) and how(s) for that.

So today while trying to push some commits into my github repo, I found this error:

fatal: unable to access ‘https://github.com/mohonish/****.git/’: Could not resolve host: github.com

I tried it out in my browser, and it showed a DNS lookup failed error. Well this was a first, for github. I opened IsItDownRightNow immediately, which showed that GitHub was up and running as usual.

Now that kind of freaked me out. So it was my ISP’s DNS service that could not route me to Github. What? BSNL? Really?

I can still access github through proxy. But that won’t help me as a permanent solution.

I’m going to add the Google Public DNS servers. I guess that might solve it. Will update as soon as this is resolved.

UPDATE (2/1/2015):
http://www.zdnet.com/article/india-lifts-block-on-vimeo-pastebin-internet-archive-others-still-banned/

So GitHub was blocked along with 31 other websites for being used to spread Anti-India content by terrorists. Reportedly, the bad on GitHub was lifted today – which means that BSNL uncles will get the news tomorrow morning, debate over it till next week, and hopefully we’ll have it back by the end of the month.

Sigh!

UPDATE (3/1/2015)
Apparently on adding Google’s public DNS servers, I can access github through my browser, but not through terminal. I wonder why! Hmm…

Linux CUPS Printing Error – Filter Failed

Almost every time that you face some kind of error or bug on your linux system and can’t figure out why, there will be at least one person who will have faced the same and have posted it online asking for help. And almost always, there will be a good samaritan who had popped up and dropped an interesting workaround or solution to the problem.

Well, almost every time.

So after having updated the kernel on my relatively new installation of Fedora 20, my HP printer stopped working. I had hplip installed and the printer worked fine previously. I accessed CUPS jobs panel at http://localhost:631/jobs and found the error on the print job to be “Filter Failed”. It didn’t hit me at first, but an obvious cause to the error was a dependency issue.

The solution was simple. I ran hp-doctor which is a self-diagnostic utility by HP, and it fixed the dependencies for me. How cool is that!

I think I should mention my references to people who are struggling with an HP printer on a Linux (maybe Fedora) distro.

Here is the original bug on bugzilla. (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=611255)

Update: Typical good samaritan found on stackexchange. (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/77139/filter-failed-from-hplip)

If anybody has encountered any other specific errors with HP printers and linux, feel free to approach me. I’ll try my best to help you out.

Peace out!