Pfff, finally an update. Have done a lot since last month. Let’s talk about the split of our first e-mail server. That didn’t went very well the first two times (saturday night and firday night). The first time we crossed by that about 15 domains had mailboxes bigger then 1Gb. Imagine that an average e-mail is about 2k, so that there were 1G / 2K = 536.870.912 files into one directory. And that these were also very fragmentated (because mails are not flushed to the disk beyond each other). So transferring of these directories took too much time (about one hour each). So we skipped the whole thing to a week later.
That friday night, with all the courage we had we tried again (in the meantime we had trashed those – big – e-mail boxes). Almost everything went well, only some particular domains didn’t work well. The next day our support box was filled with lots of e-mail about slow POP connections etc. Also our Mail eXchangers (that are the servers in the MX records with SPAM- and virusscanning) were kind of overloaded. After seeking for the problem for almost three days we found it. The harddisk in the new POP-server was really slow (15MB/s at idle) so we had to go another night to replace the new POP-server with a good new server :). This was planned for Saturday afternoon (there was good weather so the server weren’t that busy). But when I finished setting up the new POP server, I got an SMS from my colleague Freek that the ‘real’ POP server was down. I logged in and saw that the filesystem was mounted read-only. Fuck, the harddisk crashed 16 hours too early :).
So, we had to prepare ourselfs for another night datacenter. The harddisk was fully lost so we had to use the backup from Friday morning, so people who didn’t fetched their e-mail this day have lost e-mail received that day. Nothing to do on that. After unpacking the backup we were able to restore the new POP-server (pop03) so that everything worked well. With solving this problem the load of the MXs also lowered. So the slow/damaged harddisk was the originator of this problem :(.
Enough about the Tiscom e-mail system ;). I’m back at school since the 31th of August. I still have to come into the ‘one-hour-rhytm’, but that will happen within two weeks. After that everything must go fast and the next vacation will arrive soon :).
Also football is going fine, I’m playing in our fifth team and sitting on the bench at the first team. Speak you hopefully a bit sooner ;).
