Frozen Industries

I moved back to Postfix for my server’s SMTP option. Gmail’s SMTP server overwrote the ‘from’ address for every email that went out, which was annoying.

I finally finished moving my email server from a self hosted setup to Gmail for Domains. There were three main parts of the move: configuring inbound email to end up on the Gmail servers, copying all my current email to Gmail, and then setting up local mail to be sent using Google’s SMTP server. The most time consuming part of the move was copying all my current mail over using a nice utility someone had written. Configing the DNS services and watching the changes propigate was the most interesting part of the move.

Postfix has been replaced with ssmtp on my server, and I now have a few extra CPU cycles and MB’s of memory to dedicate to Apache, Lighty, and MySQL.

Just got the coolest email ever:
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Welcome to our beta test!

Thanks for helping us test Gmail for your domain! We’re excited to help you offer Gmail accounts with your domain.

Here’s how to get started:
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While I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to give up controlling my own mail server, I’m actually excited about it now. I’ll no longer need to keep updating my postfix+cyrus+mysql setup, which will allow me more time with Apache, Lighttpd, and MySQL. Plus the constant struggle of slowing down spam is something I’d be happy of offload. The more I think about it, the less reasons I have for not moving. Space? 2 GB is more than enough. Ads? I’ll get less spam with Gmail, at least the ads will be targeted and not stupid, if they exist at all. IMAP access? The GMail web interface is just as effienct to work with, if not more, than Thunderbird. Plus standard Gmail has at least POP access, this may even offer IMAP, I guess we’ll see.

And then there are thing which are just better all around, such as the Gmail web interface vs Squirrelmail and the spam filter which just works vs. manual tuning of spam assassin. Time to go sign up.

I felt good about my current state of the RoR FrozenTech Store so I decided to roll it out tonight. I quickly realized I would have to upgrade my MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1, something I had been putting off for a while. I followed the Gentoo upgrade docs, and they worked perfectly, but it did take over an hour to compile the new version plus all the other stuff which depened on it. That was fine though, as Christina and I watched some episodes of Battlestar from season one which we had not seen.

After everything was done compiling, I restored all the databases, checked existing sites, uploaded new files, edited apache and lighttpd config files, and restarted every service a few times. The good news is that everything looks like it’s working the way it should. There’s still a lot of tweaking that need to be done to the store and the surrounding site, but I’m looking forward to it. The Ruby on Rails environment has been fun to work with.

Found a 300 GB Seagate IDE drive yesterday at a decent price at Circuity City. It will become my new USB backup drive, my current 200 GB USB backup drive will move into my RAID array (losing 80GB in the process), and the current 120 GB drive in the array is being trashed, since its 3 year warranty expired January 8th (21 days ago).

Everything in the raid recovery went well, I shutdown the system, swapped disks, and started back up. After several hours of rebuilding, the array is running again in normal mode and all data is still intact.

Woke up this morning to find this in my inbox:

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WARNING: Some disks in your RAID arrays seem to have failed!
Below is the content of /proc/mdstat:

Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid5]
md0 : active raid5 sdg1[6] sdf1[5] sde1[4] sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[7](F) sda1[0]
703121664 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [7/6] [U_UUUUU]

unused devices:

———–

Which means I get to buy a new hard drive today since everything in my RAID is out of warranty, and I don’t have any spare drives at the moment. I’ll be looking for something with a decent warranty and a big trunk.

After struggling all day yesterday, I finally got my typo installs going on Lighttpd with Apache passthough. I think it was the virtual server aspect that kept messing me up, but after 4 hours yesterday, I somehow got it going after 30 seconds of work this morning.

Typo feels much faster now than when it was running on plain Apache2 + FCGI.

Just upgraded all my WordPress blogs to version 2.0. It was, as usual, way too simple. Just upload new files, run the upgrade script, and it works. It took me longer to read the instructions than actually perform the upgrade on 3 sites.

So after spending the morning being sick I got some coffee and managed to get ruby on rails, and this blog, running. I’m happy, now time to wash some dishes.