zeroxcool.net – Harm van Tilborg

Yesterday, finally Debian Sarge (3.1r0) was released. After three year of intensive development by lots of volunteers this – in my opinion the best – Linux taste has been set out of the (frozen) ‘testing’ range. Were it was put into, I thought August 2004. When everybody was thinking it shouldn’t take longer then two months :)…

Today, I finally had some spare time, the GPS project (see 6th of May) had to be delivered today. Almost everything was finished, minus some small points. Also most of all other school tasks were finished. So, in two weeks I finally have my – well-deserved – holidays :D. After finishing the GPS project, I had to fix something for the Henri Bloem site, doing some things in the garden, and now, time to test ‘Sarge’.

I already had a Woody box at home, which was running a 2.6 kernel though. So, I thought, just upgrade to Sarge as stated in the release notes. Everything went well, upgrade took about half an hour (at a PII 400MHz machine, not bad). Then it was time to reboot, checked everything again, and there we go…

When the machine was about to start LILO mr. Murphy appeared. Only ‘LI’ was located, fuck, I think I had to run lilo before rebooting. Now, I still have to reinstall everything. Not bad, because the system was running Woody for about 2 and a half years by now, and really stressed with lots of unstable software, haha.

Have fun watching the end of 24‘s season 4, again a increment of pleasure in comparison with season 3 :D.

Not quite an active log, huh. Time to change, I’m not going to tell you what I’ve done and what I didn’t, just anything I _would_ like to talk about. It was just annoying to tell everything I’ve done this week, so there wasn’t a motivation to log. Well, now there is.

This week I’m having a week of vacation. Well, vacation, let’s say, not going to school. Because I had to do lots of things for school this week. We’re working on a GPS program (on PDA and desktop) to make it possible to set out walkings with a GPS device. Quite interesting project, but it takes lots of time. We’re still running on schedule, I hope in a few weeks I can show the final results.

At work everything is also fine. We’ve introduced – after months of testing – finally our virus- and spamscanning – mail exchangers. Our mail system is now much more reliable to outages of one particulair server. I’ve ASCII-arted an impression of the current situation:

	MX1	= mx1.mail.tiscomhosting.nl
	MX2	= mx2.mail.tiscomhosting.nl
	POP01	= pop01.mail.tiscomhosting.nl

	 /----------------\				/----------------\
========\|      MX1       |				|     POP01      |/==========
inet in	||   virus and    |========\		/=======|  POP archiver  || inet out
========/|  spam scanner  |        |            |	|		 |\==========
	 `----------------'        |            |	`----------------'
				   \[ internal ]/
				   /[ network  ]\
	 /----------------\	   |		|	/----------------\
========\|      MX2       |	   |		|	|     POPxx      |/==========
inet in	||   virus and    |========/		\=======|  POP archiver  || inet out
========/|  spam scanner  |				|		 |\==========
	 `----------------'				`----------------'

As you can see, mail only comes in via the two MX servers. They scan all e-mail on SPAM and virusses. Virus e-mail is immediately deleted, SPAM e-mail otherwise is being tagged with an striking subject name. After that it is forwarded through the internal network to the POP-servers, they store all e-mail for clients and give them out on request. The internal forwarding is done by SMTP and the POP-servers only allow SMTP-traffic from the internal network.

Well, if one of the MX servers is down, there’s no problem, the other one will still receive incoming e-mail. If one of the POP-servers fails, the mail is still being queued at the MX’s. They will deliver everything when the POP-server is comming back up. The only remaining problem, when a POP-server is down, clients are unable to download their e-mail, that shouldn’t be a big problem because the POP-server didn’t have a higher downtime than a half an hour last year. Nice solution we still think.

Tomorrow again a football match.