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The startup goes live

I’m the silent half of Grania’s business. The business process, policy and web monkey. I talk about marketing, lead generation, moving people through the funnel – she gets to teach pre-schoolers Music Together® classes.

The best part of all – telling friends that the business had gone live – and watching the Apache logs to see when people hit the site. It was a real warm and fuzzy moment to see .. one.. two.. three.. then more hits to the site. Early days; and friends aren’t customers – but one step has been taken.

Heat kills hard drives

It was hot this weekend – over 35°C (92°F) outside – and the home servers were suffering somewhat.

Western Washington is pretty friendly for servers – it’s usually cool – but we do get occasional spikes.

Normally I’ll add an extra fan to the rack – but this time I was away for the weekend. The firewall/IDS server hard drive collapsed and died. The alert monitors sent a final notification that the internal temperature reached 120°C. The final straw was a power outage for over an hour that triggered the UPS and graceful shutdown. On power restoration everything came back as expected – but the firewall sat with an unbootable file system.

It only took twenty minutes to replace the hardware – and it running happily at 42°C right now.

 

hardwaregraphs.cgi

Postfix, IPv6 and non-delivery

Interesting issue this week with Postfix and IPv6. The webserver was resolving MX records as usual for delivery of blog notification – and also looking up AAAA records for delivery via SMTP over IPv6. Without a functioning route from home to the far end these were obviously failing and not retrying with the (routable) IPv4.

The fix was to force Postfix to only use IPv4 – there’s a great readme on this.

/etc/postfix/main.cf:
    # You must stop/start Postfix after changing this parameter.
    inet_protocols = ipv4       (DEFAULT: enable IPv4 only)