What I Learned Today

i don't understand quite what is going on with our cvs server's mail config - seems that both sendmail and qmail are installed. Both Qmail and SendMail are logging info into the syslog, a majority of it being sendmail info.


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Testing an SMTP server via the command line

telnet smtp.smtpdomain.com 25

ehlo somedomain.com

mail to:someuser@smtpdomain.com
rcpt to:someuser@somedomain.com
data
subject some subject

CTRL D CTRL D

quit

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1. I had to setup our Knowledge base to work externally as well as internally and I completely forgot that I needed to setup a listener on port 80 on the firewall for the IP address that is associated with the DNS name. I had setup the destination set and the web publishing rule but not the listener. Once I turned that on, all is well.

1. More AS/400 fun - I finally replaced the bad disk tonight using the handy dandy - AS/400e Server 170 and 250 Problem, Analysis, Repair and Parts guide. its a 600 page book. i only needed about 5 pages though and it was fairly straight forward. So for $50 for the replacement hard drive, I was able to get the system back up to full strength. But now it is complaining about auxillary storage shortage... so i'm not sure what all is going on.

i'm a bad bad blogger... how am i going to remember what I learned if I don't write it down.

1. Still dealing with the AS400 and the bad disk. I decided I should do a full backup of the entire system that way if I end up destroying data when I remove the bad disk (despite the OSs reassurance that I won't) I can atleast attempt to restore from a full backup. Turns out a full backup is a pretty big deal and requires shutting down all the subssystems. I ran the backup on Thursday before I left at 4:30. I was out of the office next day and naively assumed the system would bring it self back online after it completed the backup. I was wrong. Since I was en route to KY on Friday, I was stuck on the phone trying to walk poor Mo through bringing the system back up. It never did come back online so it was waiting for me on monday. It wasn't a big deal to bring it back it up, it seems it was in "attended" IPL mode. Once the system was online, all was well. Every Monday night the machine automagically IPL's itself. Which has never been a problem before, except that I have to mount the NFS shares on Tuesday morning. Well yesterday, i went to mount the shares, but the system wasn't up. It seems the system was waiting for assistance and also was in "attended" IPL mode. I'm not sure if this has to do with the bad disk, or something that happened with the back or something that Mo inadvertantly did.. but its rather annoying. The plan is to now replace the disk on thursday evening (we are off on Fri).

2. Currently I am using backup exec for the backup of all my dev systems. This works ok, but using a single DLT drive is a pain and it is not part of the weekly offsite tape rotation. Everyone keeps saying how amazing rsync is.. so I figured I would set something up using this little tool. I need to backup everything but the NFS mounts, so I'm doing something like this...

rsync --single-file-system -aRv / /usr /var /tmp helios:/nas/qaroot/software/images/nobackup/'hostname'

yes i'm using .. cringe .. rsh .. but I have my reasons.. mainly. i'm lazy.

3. I have still not figured out my mac issues.. nor why my new NIS slave doesn't seem to be working quite right..

4. There is a big buzz about Apple's bootcamp -- its pretty slick allowing you to boot windows on an intel mac. There is also virtualization software out there that will let you run windows simultaneously with OSX. What would be interesting to me would be software that would allow you to buy a mac box, load with windows, then run OSX in a window...

5. Beth is so good at documenting my travels... she is pretty creative too , she used the camcorder to record the radio broadcast and that made it easy for me to transfer it to the computer. Here is a pic from inside the big empty, black ride...