Just Found Out...Mail's Not Being Queued

[lwood]

Apparently, my backup mail exchanger is not queueing up e-mails for my domains like it's supposed to.

That means that instead of mail being held on the other server until I come online and can catch it, it's all bounding.

...I fail. I fail so bad.

However, I should reiterate that all your old stuff is fine; the failure of new stuff to properly accumulate is the fault of another guy who I should not have trusted for this long; he's let me down before, but I tend to trust past reason and out to fault.

I was in the middle of doing the restore, and asked countgeiger to help move the system configuration files to a place where we could go through them carefully and incorporate the old customizations into the current state of the art... and he was playing WoW while he heard me, and WoW while he did it, and has had a crazy week at work, so he ran right over the real configuration files instead, rendering the system an immediate and unusable mess.

Which meant I had to start the entire rebuild from scratch.

He's sorry.

That's nice.

I'm the one up until three-thirty.

When I nearly had a barebones system up to where I could customize it, I made a wrong choice, and made the system unbootable again. Easier to start yet another rebuild than chase the module loading error through the backwoods.

Things will work as soon as I can make them so; knowing now that mail isn't being properly queued on my backup mail exchanger has hit me quite hard on top of the rest of the evening's setbacks. I shall start dropping other committments, in light of this, so that things may be brought back online as soon as possible, and that, in turn, you can all move your e-mail someplace more reliable; not that I'm turning anything off, but I'm clearly not to be trusted.

Well.

At least it was nice to visit the Sea.

-- Lorrie

Comments

[countgeiger.livejournal.com]

Hon, your screw-up is only costing us about 4 hours, really. We'll get this done. MINE was the big screwup here. I should know better than to touch a root prompt when utterly brainfried.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Hon, we've all done teh st00p1d from time to time; it didn't destroy data, it only frittered time.

It's all right; we go on, it's what we do.

Besides, you brought name service up, and have thus done summat to redeem yourself.

-- Lorrie

[purplevenus.livejournal.com]

You are not dropping our Headwash!

[countgeiger.livejournal.com]

Don't worry. She's up and about, and DLP is coming to get her shortly. :)

[lwood.livejournal.com]

No worries there--dpaxson essentially gave me to understand that death wasn't keeping me from your headwash, so I should jolly well haul myself out of the casket and into the car, kthxbai.

;)

And such a lovely headwash it was, too!

By the by, naughty little omo Exu that I am, I appear to have your truck keys. Pray call when you wake that we may arrange a rescue...

-- Lorrie

[like-trees.livejournal.com]

I'm horribly behind; I've been sick with a cold and dealing with finals and that kind of thing. Would you add me to your recently created filter? The Umbanda possessiony one?

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Sure!

There's only two posts on it so far; there will be more as next March slowly trundles towards us:

I babble about woowoo chili peppers. (http://lwood.livejournal.com/148772.html)

I explain wtf is going on here, anyway. (http://lwood.livejournal.com/149265.html)

Thanks for any commentary you might make!

-- Lorrie

[like-trees.livejournal.com]

I'm between semesters right now and computer access is at a minimum but I'll be sure to take a look soon. :)

[lwood.livejournal.com]

The key event isn't 'til March--take your time. 8-)

-- Lorrie

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap. As the person who mentioned backup MX queueing a couple of posts back, I feel bad that I had any part in your current unhappiness.

I'm afraid I don't understand the "visit the Sea" reference.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap. As the person who mentioned backup MX queueing a couple of posts back, I feel bad that I had any part in your current unhappiness.

*lopsided grin* You pointed out that I should have paid more attention than I had been.

I reckon, however, that the time has quite come to start asking my sysadmin buddies who are not the gent in question if we can start mutually swapping DNS and MX relay services for each other at the very least, and potentially nightly rsyncs one to another of particularly critical/favorite data.

-- Lorrie

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

Those are very useful. I've already got reciprocal agreements for secondary MX and DNS with a very stable and reliable friend, but I'd be quite happy to supply secondary for others, and would mind having a tertiary in case some weird disaster happens to this guy's house.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Sure--once I have basic functionality restore, let's talk.

-- Lorrie

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I don't understand the "visit the Sea" reference.

Ah, well, the Mad Scientists had their annual retreat down at Asilomar, and took me with them. Asilomar is on the ocean...

-- Lorrie

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks.

Man, that toponym really looks like it should be from Tolkien — maybe Asílomar? Or possibly Asilómar, which would shift the meaning to something along the lines of "something-place-home" (whereas the version with -síl- seems to relate to "shining").

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Man, that toponym really looks like it should be from Tolkien

It was a Spanish neologism, winner of a "name this place" contest, from asilo (refuge, retreat) and mar (sea).

But after that? Yeah, looks Elvish to me, too. ;)

-- Lorrie

[dubhain.livejournal.com]

...I fail. I fail so bad.
...I'm clearly not to be trusted.

I realize you've had sleep, and that ye and he are taking care of the problem now.

However, FWIW, I'd still trust you to provide email, &c. for me. Not that you do, or that I need you to, but that I would. Capisce?

We've known each other a while: Good, bad and indifferent. You're good people, Lorrie. Don't let anyone tell you you aren't.

Or, of course, you could send them to me for a thorough ass-flaming. <G.> They'd get it.

Take care. Better geek luck with the next iteration. Personally, I find it helps to keep a rubber chicken (RFC2321) plugged into my network.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

I realize you've had sleep, and that ye and he are taking care of the problem now.

'strewth. That was a "wah I suck" 3am message of the classic form. I woke up, realized as much, and went about my day.

We've known each other a while: Good, bad and indifferent. You're good people, Lorrie. Don't let anyone tell you you aren't.

Hey, thanks! I appreciate that!

Or, of course, you could send them to me for a thorough ass-flaming. <G.> They'd get it.

Hey, D'troit, while I grant you've had a tougher row to hoe than I ever did, they didn't exactly raise pansies in Cleveland either--but I do appreciate it. It's always so much fun to be handed a delegate flame, one need worry so much less about the aftereffects...

Take care. Better geek luck with the next iteration. Personally, I find it helps to keep a rubber chicken (RFC2321) plugged into my network.

*cough* As noted elsewhere, my network wanted a rat skull onnastick--the stick is an old Palm stylus, it's set in a cheery polymer clay base in which I have inscribed highly appropriate verse composed for the occasion in the runes of the Elder Futhark.

I take a lot in stride, but, as walkyrja succinctly puts it, "you fuck with my village, you're going down."

The userspace hackers of a couple years ago had definitely done that...so I did it and then wrote all about it for publication in Idunna, which gets appreciative nods from magically inclined geeks, and, well, the folks who thought me crazy now feel themselves satisfied. 8-)

Name service is now working; next is the three-ring circus of mail daemon (postfix), content scanner (amavisd-new with corollary virus scanner clam and spam scanner SpamAssassin), and mailing list software (Ecartis, which I like better than mailman, and not just because it was written by an ex-boyfriend).

Over the course of the next week, the web services will come back online.

Not that you're invested, but as you gave me the necessary gentle fwap for my midnight kweebling, I figured you should know. 8-)

-- Lorrie

[dubhain.livejournal.com]

Hey, D'troit, while I grant you've had a tougher row to hoe than I ever did, they didn't exactly raise pansies in Cleveland either

Never crossed my mind that they did. Cleveburg has its reputation for a reason, y'know?

I was in Flint for a couple weeks, recently. Holy Hel. Looked like her lower half. (No offense to her, of course.)

As noted elsewhere, my network wanted a rat skull onnastick--the stick is an old Palm stylus, it's set in a cheery polymer clay base in which I have inscribed highly appropriate verse composed for the occasion in the runes of the Elder Futhark.

iNiding Pole? Thought that was supposed to be a horse's skull. Or was that the vacuum tube version?

Glad everything will be on line shortly. I've faith in you, FWIW.

[ivy]

so I did it and then wrote all about it for publication in Idunna, which gets appreciative nods from magically inclined geeks, and, well, the folks who thought me crazy now feel themselves satisfied. 8-)

Is there an online version of this? I'd be interested. [grin]

[ivy]

Oh, that so sucks. I'm very sorry; you have my sympathy, and I'm sure most geeks are wincing along in harmony -- it's happened to us all.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

True, dat.

Some day, I will tell the tale of The Worst IT Boner I Ever Pulled.

-- Lorrie

[ivy]

On my third day on a new job, I found out they hadn't changed their router passwords in three years. Horrified, I set about changing them all. It was only after I'd logged out of the last router that I decided to log into one and check my work. Couldn't log in to anything. 15 minutes of sheer panic. I eventually realized that "enable secret $newpassword" was the correct Cisco command, and not "enable secret password $newpassword". So, I'd effectively set all the passwords on the whole backbone to "password". Genius.

I did realize and fix it before having to tell anyone, but yeesh. Bad day. Go "security".

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

And go "checking your work". There're days when I feel like I need to check that an assignment like "$x = 5" worked — and then there are the days when I find that it actually didn't for some reason, and it's a damn good thing I double-checked!

[ivy]

What I should have done (and did, after that) was to keep a different terminal window logged in as the admin user so that in case of doom where I didn't have the ability to re-guess the password, I still had the ability to change it. Hard-learned lesson.

But yes, I'm very glad I checked.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Yeah, an OpenSSH upgrade nearly bit me that way once...happily I still had a window open, and hupping the main sshd doesn't kill the children, or I would have been deeply screwed.

-- Lorrie

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Aie--death by semicolon!

-- Lorrie

[lwood.livejournal.com]

*snort!*

Thanks for sharing that!

-- Lorrie

[ivy]

[grins] Any time. (Personally, I think more people *should* talk about their failures. Keeps us humble, humanizes folks, and often alleviates suffering for others who either might have made a similar mistake or are convinced that they have a technical black thumb when in fact they just had a bad day.)