I’ve got mail

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A week ago the pow­er went out here at Chez Splicer. Believe me, I was not hap­py to be dragged out of bed by the sound of the UPS. Well, I got to my beloved RS/6000 Mod­el 250 and shut it down prop­er­ly before the UPS died, but for some unknown rea­son it would­n’t come back on in the morning.

IBM built those things like Mack trucks. So actu­al­ly I spent the last week just try­ing to get the case off the machine to look at the insides. In the mean­time, I’ve had no email.

The first thing I did was to blow out all the dust using com­pressed air. The next thing was reseat the mem­o­ry chips. Now the sys­tem is up again and email for me is work­ing. But any­one who has emailed me in the last sev­en days has got­ten a bounce mes­sage. Sor­ry about that.

My mail­ing lists have been down the whole time too.

This whole thing makes me ques­tion the wis­dom of run­ning my own mailserv­er. Espe­cial­ly a mailserv­er run­ning 13-year-old hard­ware. But you know, I had 190 days uptime on this box before the pow­er went out. And I had over 180 when I shut it down to move it into the new apart­ment. Still, week-long gaps in ser­vice bring me to a “one nine” envi­ron­ment. Beware the ama­teur sysadmin.

Things Behind the Sun—Nick Drake

Published by splicer

One Reply to “I’ve got mail”

  1. I think the same thing
    I think the same thing some­times — I go back and forth between host­ing my own domain at home or using my web host to do it for me. Part of me likes the techie geek­i­tude of run­ning it from home. I real­ly like run­ning SA on my home email. When I con­sult­ed, I *need­ed* to have IMAP access to my email from client offices.

    Now, I’m kin­da halfway there — my home box pulls mail using fetch­mail, so if it goes down I can still limp along. I SSH in for most of my mail from work. And, it runs the BBS — realitycheckbbs.kataan.org.

    Aside: Syn­chronet BBS soft­ware includes a web inter­face, gopher, news, ftp and list­serv — you can use it like a glo­ri­fied mail­ing list, and the mes­sage board becomes the archive.

    Now that I’m work­ing full­time, will be doing so for the con­ceiv­able future and have oth­er pri­or­i­ties, time­wise, I’m doubt­ful I’ll ever do every­thing in-house again. Def­i­nite­ly not with­out RAID’ed dri­ves — although the last dri­ve fail­ure I had was on the BBS back in 96 or so (knock wood) I could just imag­ine hav­ing a dri­ve go and put me out of com­mis­sion for a cou­ple of days. I don’t want to go there.

    Web host­ing accounts are get­ting damn cheap. I’m spend­ing $10/month for unlim­it­ed email accounts, mail­ing lists, web/php/mysql sup­port, and 150 megs of disk space (with more avail­able for free) and I’m over­pay­ing because I don’t want to move.

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