zeroxcool.net – Harm van Tilborg

Well, after a long time some updates. The DigiMatrix project can start, I have received all the materials, looking for the Celeron FSB400 CPU was the hardest part. It was set EOL (End Of Life) in December 2004 so almost no (web)shop had it available. However Alternate did. As said, I ordered the memory, harddisk and CPU at Cool Prices, but the CPU delivered with this package was a FSB500 (Prescott-core) processor, which can not be ran on the motherboard. So I had to look for another. Besides the not very good experiences with the delivery they were kind enough to take back the CPU (slightly used of course and with some cool pasta on it). Good job Cool Prices!

The Linux part with the DigiMatrix has to wait. As stated on my ASUS DigiMatrix page I had also found Media Portal, which runs under Windows (blame me :)) and .Net (blame me even more ;)), so I’m going to try that first.

Also some news from work. Our first mail server is heavily overloaded, load doesn’t get below 4 and that’s on a single CPU box. So, it was time to either upgrade the machine to a dual CPU box and faster I/O or to split accounts to a new server. We made the last choice. So, now a way to avoid e-mailing those 4000 clients who are going to be transferred to the new box. A colleague of me came up with Perdition (no, not from the movie). Perdition is a POP proxy, it is able to reroute a POP-request to the right server. So if a user connects to let’s say pop.example.com (192.168.0.1) Perdition checks its own database (ODBC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LDAP, BDB, GDBM) to determine where the request has to be forwarded to. Mail for example.net is handled by pop01.example.com (192.168.0.5) and mail for example.org is handled by pop10.example.com (192.168.0.10). So, all the traffic will be transferred through Perdition. Now the user doesn’t have to know on whether POP server it is, we (well, Perdition) decide for them. We use the GDBM database, because it’s familiar with the data format used on qmail’s smtproutes. The only (big) thing left is to split the accounts to the new server and put the real mail box on another IP. This will be done on a Saturday night (less traffic and we have whole Sunday left to ‘repair’ things if necessary), we have to determine what date exactly because we’re still waiting for the new mailserver. I just finished configuring the new Perdition proxy server, so that part is finished. Next time hopefully more about this :)!

Another cool fact, tomorrow trainings of my footbal team starts. I have already tried to build up my condition by doing some running. Let’s see if that was enough to run the warming-up without gasping ;).