tin_the_fatty weblog

for two days, while I was trying to upgrade some of the port software on the FreeBSD virtual server. I got totally confused with the PHP port and the few WordPress instances went down for a little over 24 hours.
For the record, just build and install the PHP5 port, then PHP5-extensions port. Ignore all the [...]

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We are in the process of migrating some of our users to the excellent Google Apps, which BTW I am very impressed.
This is a short screencast I did with SnapzProX, in Cantonese, showing how to import existing emails from a POP3 server. REMEMBER use your own account names and passwords!!

Enjoy.

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Seagate plans to stop manufacturing IDE drives by year end. That could mean no more IDE replacement drives in a couple of years’ time. Maybe it’s time to consider upgrading those HD casings. The next lot of HDs in Mother will likely be SATA.

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Jeremy Zawodny just suffered from a hardware RAID corruption and has decided to go back to software RAID.
I switched my home server to using a hardware RAID not too long ago, and am very happy with it, and I have promised myself that I would switch mother from using a software RAID over to a [...]

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Over 365 days of uptime, mother just suffered a kernel panic and died. The fine supporting staff at KDDI reset the computer for me, and mother came up sync’ed the soft RAID and went back to normal.
I have yet to figure out how to conduct a proper postmortem for OpenBSD, as both the hardware and [...]

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I have just upgraded the IMAP/POP3 server on mother to the 1.0-stable version of Dovecot. Now Dovecot uses PostgreSQL as table lookup as well, so the migration is now complete.

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Long story short:-

Mother’s email system uses MySQL as table lookup.
Since hosting a couple of additional domains which are constantly being bombarded by spammers, the MySQL server under heavier load kept losing connections (dropped email connection/transfer, no big deal, the other side would just retry in a few minutes) and sometimes even hanged (big [...]

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There are six coop members, taking up around 10GB of disk space, leaving 50GB of free space at this point in time. I think it was the majority of coop members’ intention to host their photo and movie libraries when they first signed up. That didn’t completely materialize.
James mentioned that it takes far too long [...]

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Mother dropped off the Internet last night. No big deal, I thought, just call the KDDI staff to have mother rebooted. Two hours passed, and mother was still unaccessible. Another reboot and still no good. The KDDI staff plugged a monitor to mother, and told me that mother appeared to be unresponsive, with a bunch [...]

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Dovecot 0.99.10.8 installed from the ports collection on mother running OpenBSD 3.6 didn’t work for some of the Coop members, with their indices corrupting and imap processes hanging and stopping further imap processes from running properly.
Updated to the latest stable release 0.99.12.1 manually. The login processes kept dying. It just didn’t work.
Tried the latest 1.0 [...]

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Mother was running OpenBSD 3.3, which is now over two years old. Over the last couple of weeks I installed the latest shining OpenBSD 3.6 and all of the necessary software onto a HD, and on Saturday I swapped it into mother and migrated the data over to the new system.
I expected to spend only [...]

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Mother crashed shortly after midnight last night. I didn’t find out about it until this morning.
This has been the 2nd crash in the last two months, since last time. A bit too frequent for comfort, so instead of asking the KDDI staff to reset mother, I went to the data centre to conduct a post-mortem.
The [...]

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Mother the coop server went down the third time unintentionally at 1100 hours this morning since it went up to the rack about nine months ago. By around 1300 hours it was obvious that it was no network glitches. I suppose I should have gone into the data centre, plug a monitor and a keyboard [...]

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No reason not to. In fact, I should have done it ages ago.
James reported mother being down yesterday. When I got home a few hours later it was all back to normal.
When a packet travels from one of our personal computers to mother, it passes thru at least three different parties’ equipment, and like [...]

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