Andy Kopciuch's Blog
Saturday, July 14, 2007
pfqueue, Telus & Riders - 64bits, V240 & hot
That's right ... I doubled it up in this blog. I've been so consumed lately, I never really wanted to write anything. It's about time again ... so here it goes.
Was having some problems with a mail server. Been ongoing issues, and I couldn't really figure them out in short time. I needed to really dedicate myself to it at some point. When I finally did I tried to get a postfix queue listing with mailq ... Big mistake when there are thousands of message in the queue. I did some searching and found pfqueue. Nifty little ncurses program for postfix queue management. To cut the really really long story short, I found that one of the accept subnets on the server was an 'A' class subnet. Not needed ... and no one knows why it was in the original list of networks to allow. So some spammer found a closed relay, which was an open relay just for him on his subnet. YIKES! So that has been rectified, and that spammer crunched at the kernel level.
Also had some joyus fun with Telus again. 2 connections from Telus at one location. The new one is not working. no DHCP address returned, not even 10.x.x.x to get to OCA. ????? Stan took over from there with the support calls. We were finally informed it is a managed Telus High Speed account, so the static IP is actually assigned, and not done through DHCP. Gah. If only I had been informed of that to start with ... I've configured a network card or two in the past ... but maybe I would have need to read the man page on interfaces. (/me is done being sarcastic).
My Riders are off to a great start to the CFL season. Undefeated Pre-season, and start the season 2-0. We gave Calgary a massive thumping 49-9. It was super sweet. John P. came over for the game. We had some slurpee, and some Vern's pizza. Nice day.
Dealing with Cent OS on a 64bit system. I was updating the MySQL, and PHP for a hosting package called Interworx. Seems pretty nice, although I do not really play with it much. We ran into a problem with recompilining the src RPMS, 64 vs 32 library problems, but I managed to get most of them fixed. The perl-DB package wouldn't recompile, and we decided to skip that one, until we realized it was required by spamassassin. So off to work I go. Seems that the MySQL 5 does not compile with -fPIC, so when other packages link against libmysqlclient.a it bombs out. I fixed that by changing the rpmrc to compile with fPIC, and Craig says everything seems to be working jsut fine now.
Lost 2 days of sleep. Gord phoned me one night at 2:15 A.M. We took over a new client, and he installed the new rack. Turned the Solaris servers off, and they did not come back online. Damn! I knew right away they needed to be manually booted. no monitors (not even video cards), so hook up the serial cable. All he had was DB9 to DB9 serial, and the Sun Fires had RJ45 serial connectoions for the management ports. Bah! So gregg ended up bringing a DB9 to RJ45 cable, I met him wee hours of the morning, hyperterm was a bust, we could see things, but not typey typey on the keyboard. We finally got some information from the previous maintainer, and found that the net management was on, and serial was never tested. We also found a PuTTY config already available on another windows server. So ssh in, type boot. All was good. Thank goodness it was their Stampeded BBQ, but we did get them up and running ASAP. Michelle gave us care packages with Fiddle Faddle, Poppy Cock, Candy, and some Amaretto tumblers. It was sweet ... I was tired, but happy.
HOT HOT HOT. Stampede week has been blazing hot, and 30+ temps the last few days. B.C. has broken records all week. Osoyus (sp) was 42 or something insane. So let me stock up on the water, and try to keep cool. Central air is the shit ... but I live in my heated apt ... but life is no fun unless you can complain about something. ΒΆ 11:44:00 PM 0 comments
Was having some problems with a mail server. Been ongoing issues, and I couldn't really figure them out in short time. I needed to really dedicate myself to it at some point. When I finally did I tried to get a postfix queue listing with mailq ... Big mistake when there are thousands of message in the queue. I did some searching and found pfqueue. Nifty little ncurses program for postfix queue management. To cut the really really long story short, I found that one of the accept subnets on the server was an 'A' class subnet. Not needed ... and no one knows why it was in the original list of networks to allow. So some spammer found a closed relay, which was an open relay just for him on his subnet. YIKES! So that has been rectified, and that spammer crunched at the kernel level.
Also had some joyus fun with Telus again. 2 connections from Telus at one location. The new one is not working. no DHCP address returned, not even 10.x.x.x to get to OCA. ????? Stan took over from there with the support calls. We were finally informed it is a managed Telus High Speed account, so the static IP is actually assigned, and not done through DHCP. Gah. If only I had been informed of that to start with ... I've configured a network card or two in the past ... but maybe I would have need to read the man page on interfaces. (/me is done being sarcastic).
My Riders are off to a great start to the CFL season. Undefeated Pre-season, and start the season 2-0. We gave Calgary a massive thumping 49-9. It was super sweet. John P. came over for the game. We had some slurpee, and some Vern's pizza. Nice day.
Dealing with Cent OS on a 64bit system. I was updating the MySQL, and PHP for a hosting package called Interworx. Seems pretty nice, although I do not really play with it much. We ran into a problem with recompilining the src RPMS, 64 vs 32 library problems, but I managed to get most of them fixed. The perl-DB package wouldn't recompile, and we decided to skip that one, until we realized it was required by spamassassin. So off to work I go. Seems that the MySQL 5 does not compile with -fPIC, so when other packages link against libmysqlclient.a it bombs out. I fixed that by changing the rpmrc to compile with fPIC, and Craig says everything seems to be working jsut fine now.
Lost 2 days of sleep. Gord phoned me one night at 2:15 A.M. We took over a new client, and he installed the new rack. Turned the Solaris servers off, and they did not come back online. Damn! I knew right away they needed to be manually booted. no monitors (not even video cards), so hook up the serial cable. All he had was DB9 to DB9 serial, and the Sun Fires had RJ45 serial connectoions for the management ports. Bah! So gregg ended up bringing a DB9 to RJ45 cable, I met him wee hours of the morning, hyperterm was a bust, we could see things, but not typey typey on the keyboard. We finally got some information from the previous maintainer, and found that the net management was on, and serial was never tested. We also found a PuTTY config already available on another windows server. So ssh in, type boot. All was good. Thank goodness it was their Stampeded BBQ, but we did get them up and running ASAP. Michelle gave us care packages with Fiddle Faddle, Poppy Cock, Candy, and some Amaretto tumblers. It was sweet ... I was tired, but happy.
HOT HOT HOT. Stampede week has been blazing hot, and 30+ temps the last few days. B.C. has broken records all week. Osoyus (sp) was 42 or something insane. So let me stock up on the water, and try to keep cool. Central air is the shit ... but I live in my heated apt ... but life is no fun unless you can complain about something. ΒΆ 11:44:00 PM 0 comments
