zeroxcool.net – Harm van Tilborg

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 ;).

Not very much to tell. The POP proxy project is almost finished. All the domain transfer scripts, the domain list transfer scripts etc. etc. are made. But we’re still waiting for the new mailserver, where half of all the domains at the first mailserver will be moved to. But it should be there before saturday. That night we are going to replace everything. Move half of the accounts to the new server, move the servers fysically to a new rack and to install the POP proxy, that is. I’ll share the ‘transfer-domain-to-other-vpopmail-server’ script with you on my qmail page, some days :).

The DigiMatrix project isn’t quite active yet, as I’m working on the e-mail change and Harmbox, an analystic tool I’ve created during my internship at Bronkhorst Travel. That all takes a lot of time. And there’s also the training of my football team. We’ve had about 4 training sessions by now and in one hour the fifth one. My condition was really good, I wasn’t the first one gapping after a run exercise ;). Also goalkeeping went very well, had lots of difficult balls, without even a keeper training session. That’s quite some years ago that happened last :). Well, everybody, have a nice vacation. Till the next log!

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 ;).

I’m thinking of buying I have bought an ASUS DigiMatrix ‘Home Theater PC’ (HTPC), to put Linux on it.I’ve won the box on eBay and have received it a few days ago. Today (16-7) I have received the processor (Intel Celeron D 2,4GHz), memory (Kingston 512MB DDR PC2700) and harddisk (Western Digital 200GB PATA 7200RPM). But there’s a big problem. The mainboard isn’t able to run with a Precott-core based CPU, like the one I’ve ordered. So, I’m waiting for the webshop if they can trade this one with a Northwood-based core. Nevertheless, I have done some research and there are quite some interesting projects running:

• Linux on ASUS DigiMatrix
• AsusHomeTheater forum (‘part of’ site above)
• Review on X-bit labs
• Review on Digit-Life
• Media Portal – A free (open-source) MCE like framework
• Media Portal – A FreeVO like (free) Windows ‘framework’

On this page I would like to share my experience of setting up Debian GNU/Linux on that box. It will look a lot like the Linux on ASUS DigiMatrix page, from the list above.

So, hopefully soon some more info about this really great product!

acik var