Updates (or fileservers, webservers, and email, oh my!)

[Dan Brosemer <odin@svartalfheim.net>]

Well, now that the turmoil of the last few days is over, I thought it'd be a
good time to inform you all of what's going on lately.

WEBSERVER
---------

We've been having hardware problems with bobafett (the webserver) lately.
The memory controller is faulty.  Though it's only an intermittent problem,
the server was located at SooNet, and we, of course, can't get in there at
all hours to fix problems, so we need a perfectly reliable system (or some
redundancy which we can't afford).

Now, SooNet was bought by ViaNet (a much larger northern-ontario-wide ISP).
Since they were planning on moving last Thursday, I figured it would be a
good time to collect bobafett and build a new webserver on Wednesday.  So, I
set up our (severely underpowered) CVS server as a webserver, threw the site
on it, transferred the database, and updated the DNS.  

On Thursday, I talked to Bob again (at SooNet), and was informed that our
agreement with SooNet to host our webserver wouldn't carry over to ViaNet
(yes... lots of notice) and we'd have to negotiate something with them
(argh!).

Negotiations with ViaNet are ongoing, but things look promising.  We may not
even need to provide any hardware!

EMAIL
-----

When I updated the DNS to move the website to the office, I failed to notice
an error that I made long ago in the MX records for cleannorth.org.

When we replaced leia (the old border mail gateway) with sabe (the new one),
I left the DNS records looking like this:

cleannorth.org. IN MX 10 leia
cleannorth.org. IN MX 20 bobafett

Well, when we collected bobafett on Wednesday, mail stopped going anywhere!
There is no leia, and there was no bobafett.

This wouldn't have been a problem, except that bobafett was the primary DNS
server, so now we had no method of updating the DNS records to tell mail to
go through sabe!

After much effort, we managed to change which servers were authoritative for
cleannorth.org (but that's another story) to ones we have control over, then
updated the MX records so mail is, once again, flowing.

I don't believe any mail was lost in the snafu, but I can't guarantee that
(that's a first).

MAILING LISTS
-------------

We have new software for our mailing lists.  I think I've covered all the
angles, but _please_ report any bugs as you notice them!

FILESERVER
----------

We're replacing the ageing, battered, and torn obiwan with a wee bit more
current hardware.  Obiwan has severe trouble keeping up with the backups
with only 62% usage of the data disk, so we're looking at a faster CPU... we
figured it'd be worthwhile to lump in a few more upgrades with that.

The new fileserver should be here in a week or two.  It will be a dual Xeon
450/1M with 1GB of RAM, and four 9GB disks.  5GB of that will be for data,
4GB for system (2x9GB RAID1), and 18GB for a backup staging area (2x9GB
RAID0).

Thanks for bearing with us.

-Dan

-- 
"Burnished gallows set with red
 Caress the fevered, empty mind
 Of man who hangs bloodied and blind
 To reach for wisdom, not for bread."  -- Deoridhe Grimsdaughter