I recently (attempted) to migrate the list over to a new box, this didn't go so well... Here's the story for those who care.. For the record, I'm not a professional mail administrator, I only pretend to be.
The intent was to have secure email (SMTP AUTH, IMAP SSL, Webmail HTTPS). This would eventually give me an excuse to present "How my personal mail is secure even on WEP-less networks" ;) The new box included a weeks worth of configuration work (qmail w/ patches, vpopmail, mailman, SpamAssassin, maildrop, courier-imap, and other goodies), all working in harmony. I was almost motivated to make my own qmail "toaster" ;) After a few weeks of home burn-in time and test domains, I was pretty confident it was ready for production use. I began by migrating over my peterson.org family domain. I manually converted my procmail filters to maildrop syntax. This allowed me to IMAP down remote folders (slypheed-claws is a nice Outlook'ish MUA) or use Mutt (of course compiled in with IMAP & SSL support) to view my filtered email. Everything was working great (for me). Converting other family members became a much bigger nightmare. M$ Outlook (both Mac Entourage and Win Office) doesn't like self-signed certificates. I attempted to use a real signed SSL cert, but courier-imapd barfed on that. Does anyone offer signed TLS certs? Verisign and Thawte don't seem to advertise this product. Anyhows, back to plaintext IMAP for their cranky MUA's. Then I noticed this big 2U box belongs in a co-lo, not my bed room. Off the box went, racked and good to go. Or so I thought, turns out, of the six drive 3ware RAID5 array; two drives decided to die during transportation. No big deal, I'll return back in a week with some replacements. This is when I decided to migrate over the BAWUG list. The migration itself (scp'ing over the archives, importing the mailman config, etc) worked fine, infact the list was up for a day or two. A few days later I could no longer get any service to respond (ssh, imap, etc.), but I could still ping the box. A colo visit with console revealed cranky RAID problems, ANOTHER drive failed, kernel panic, ack! It's unclear if the drive series is just faulty, power supply not giving enough juice or other problems. I've been in contact with the driver developer, we're leaning towards power issues. I'm left with a broken RAID and now have lost all my configuration work (including 5 years of converted mbox2maildir personal email). 3Ware = evil, IBM drives = evil, x86 hardware = evil, maybe they new I was using DJB wear, who knows. For now we're back to old-school sendmail, no Spam filtering, no sexy IMAP, no secure email. One day I'll get to motivation to do it all over again, but right now I'm still in pissed off mode. You'd think after working for a company with 31mil mailboxes, I'd learn managing email is no fun. This is why the list has been down for week. Anyone like to donate a Sun T1? -- Matt Peterson Bay Area Wireless Users Group Founder <http://www.bawug.org/> -- -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
