.................................
To leave Commie, hyper to
http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html
.................................

On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 10:25:23AM +0200, Jarmo Lundgren wrote:
> .................................
> To leave Commie, hyper to
> http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html
> .................................
> 
> 
> >What actually happened?
> 
> Karri updated the oy.com server to Red Hat Linux 7.2. During the process, 
> the mailing list broke.

That's only a part of the story... The lists are runnnig in a box 
called 'gothic'. That is a pretty old computer. Originally it was
running RedHat 4.2, which was the upgraded (not re-installed) to 5.1
which was then updated to 6.0 which was still running last Xmas. I 
finally managed to make (almost) a fresh install to RH7.2.

So, what changed, really? Kernel and utils, of course, but...

1) Sendmail (the email server) was updated from version 8 to 
version 9; that is almost trivial. But. The configuration was still 
based on the version 7 and thus incompatible with the new version.
I created a new config from scratch. If somebody has ever been 
configuring sendmail, well, it may not surprise you that it may take 
more than one try to make it right.

2) A lot of stuff is implemented with PERL script. Thus, I made
the move from the use on RedHat packet management to CPAN which 
is more automated and usually much better up-to-date. Unfortunately,
locations of some files and modules changed in the process and broke 
a couple of things... Including the Majordomo that is used to manage 
the mailing lists.

3) Majordomo was updated. It moved from version 1.76.x to 1.94.5.
Unfortunately, some of the file locations and required file 
permissions had changed between those version. It took some time to
realize that, and then to find what has actually changed. 

4) While doing the update, gothic also started to host two new 
virtual hosts that had to be configured in. That means that also
the sendmail had to be configured to accept the mail to those domains.
When I did that, I made one typo in the sendmail configuration so
everything broke again...

On thr brighter side, gothic also almost doubled its CPU power, doubled
the available disk space, now has a kernel that support multiple CPUs 
much better, has an internal firewall to make it more secure and has all
kinds of new nifty stuff (with some more yet to come).

--karri

PS. The lesson learned: a continuously running server can not be upgraded.
It can only be replaced with a new working and tested improved system...

-- 
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