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

[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.)