Ooo! Email on the Web!

After having to cleanup the Squirrelmail config for work, I found that Squirrelmail is nowhere near as stupid as it might seem. You just can't use the default config.

So anyhow, I have installed squirrelmail on Siona here:

https://webmail.nibble.bz

It's up, it's SSL, and so far seems to be running sortof okay. It's a little weird about the folders with sub-folders but otherwise, it's working good. Check it out!

Ciao

Fragging root sucks

Siona, the server, for no apparent external reason started freaking out about errors on the root partition. The drive is a Western Digital which seems to lend credence to the decline in quality of WD drives... Anyhow, syslog reported that the filesystem hit a couple of IO errors. For better or worse, it looks like the damage was contained to a single partition but there was some data loss. The files in /etc/apt were all corrupted.

Argh! Why? Siona is a headless server so repairing the root partition means digging out a db15-type monitor cable and stealing a keyboard and mouse from Friday, and booting to Knoppix. Fortunately, the file system repair went well. It looks like it was some sectors went bad so reiserfsck was able to rebuild the filesystem (less the corrupted files, of course). A pain in the ass, but no worse then that.

Now if only there was a way to repair a root filesystem remotely...

And in other news, I've become pretty convinced that I've burned out the wireless in my router :P Sucks cause I liked that router! It's just been having a rough life... Well, if Linksys didn't make such shitty firmware, then I wouldn't have needed to replace it will third party firmwares. Jerks. DDWRT is *way* nicer then the linksys firmware, they should just ship with that.

So for the wireless, it is a pain not having wireless so I think I'm going to get a second router and then setup a static route on the current router so that the wireless can be on a separate subnet so a) clients don't have to get NAT'ed twice going to the Internet and b) I can keep my current router with it's current firmware and configuration.

We shall see how that goes.

Restoring from Backup

A while ago I started backing up the LDAP directory on siona, just a simple cron job to slapcat the directory really. But I hadn't tested restoring from backup. Well, unlike the usual game-plan of "wait for disaster and then beg God's forgiveness for your sins and pray that restoring from backup works", I actually tested the restore! Woo!

A while ago, I had installed a base Debian/Sarge system on chevette. At the time, all I did was take an image, then shut chevette down again. I have no idea how long ago that was... At any rate, fired chevette up the other day, ran the (many) updates, and then tried to manually replicate the directory service from siona by restoring from backup. I'm pleased to say, it worked great! I even found a config error on siona in the process so I'm definitely happy!

So basically, where I'm at is I have got the directory up on chevette. Since I have been having problems upgrading the mail sub-system on siona (e.g. Postfix and periferally Dovecot), I'm going to try to replicate the mail setup from siona on chevette and see if I can get it working with the new Postfix (and everything else). And *then* if it works on chevette, I'll try it all again on siona and that way if it goes haywire on siona, I'll at least know I can wipe siona and restore the config and data from backup.

We'll see how it goes...