disruptions | Main | R.I.P., Ramones

September 16, 2004

Settling Dust

It took a few days of on-again/off-again work, but the transition from one server to another is just about done. I'm really, really happy to have less moving parts in the closet.

Once upon a time, when I was the newbiest of noobs, I sat down with a fresh Red Hat install determined to make e-mail work from it from elm (because that was the mail client I remembered from before The UnUnix Years). I knew something about sendmail (that it sent mail) and I found some half-baked tutorial someone had thrown up and I set about bending it to my will.

I got mail going from elm to my Yahoo account some time around midnight, and I went to bed convinced I'd done a good thing. I spent a day or two enjoying elm, and then I got a call from the ISP wanting to know why I was sending them all the system reports from my machine.

That would be because I told the machine it was "cstone.net," and it was dutifully appending that to the "root" part of the addresses it was sending reports to, then passing them out to the 'net at large. Don't ask me how it got that way... it just did. The tutorial made me do it. Probably written by a Mandrake user.

I still hate MTAs, even when they come packaged up by Debian with its nifty "How do you want to use this weapon? In the privacy of your own network, or in a blood-soaked rampage across the Internet?" install script. So it was very satisfying to force a reinstall of exim today, telling it that it wasn't to talk to anyone else besides itself. Then I closed port 25 to the world.

Apache's still running on the old server because I don't want to go through the pain of transplanting my gallery (and eating up 25% of my disk quota on that alone), and I prefer to have it LAN-close for uploading to it. Otherwise, most of those moving parts are now still.

It's all fairly liberating.

If I wake up in the morning to the smell of smoke coming from the server closet, my first thought will be "is it spreading to the rest of the house?" not "did it start burning before or after mysqldump copied over to the remote backup?"