I have had more fun with computers
I got a call from my friend Mau asking me if the “issues” I was having earlier this week might be contributing to a certain “slowness” he was experiencing collecting his email.
A quick check downstairs at the console revealed that, to quote Jim Lahey, I was in the eye of a shiticane. Namely row after row of nasty messages about a missing hard drive scrolling by the console.
I couldn’t clear the messages and when I rebooted I was told that /usr was missing would I care to do some fscking.
My BIOS couldn’t see the drive. I figured I was well and truly fscked.
I phoned Peach to find out about the mirror computer I ordered after my all-too-recent fiasco and was pleased to hear that, while it didn’t show up Friday as promised, it was going to be ready by 11:30.
Yesterday’s mirror is tomorrow’s production server
I must have spent most of the afternoon wrestling with the dying machine, trying to get a network connection up and trying to get some programs working – you know, like tar, rsync and ssh. Basic stuff like that.
I got good news when I saw that the partition I created for backups wasn’t among the casualties. That gave me some usable versions of the utilities I would need to get the data over to the new machine.
The next trick was getting a network connection going. I had two network interfaces. The normal one wouldn’t work, but if I told the other one it was the normal one, it suddenly worked. I have no idea why.
Then Robert Flickenger’s Linux Server Hacks saved my butt. Hack number 37 and everything was on the new machine.
But then Apache wouldn’t run because it wanted a newer version of mod_perl. “But they’re both from the same friggin’ CD!” I exclaimed as the sun started to set.
All this PERL pain meant I couldn’t use my fave server management tool to configure sendmail. I knew I needed to, because out of the box RedHat Linux makes sendmail receive from localhost only.
So I figured I’d try postfix instead. It’s apparently better and it configures with normal text files, where sendmail is legendarily complicated from the command line.
Postfix may be billed as a drop-in replacement for that other MTA but, dear readers, I assure you it is not. But I did eventually get it working.
With email working I could turn my attention to Apache and its inexplicable rejection of mod_perl.
I deleted all Apache-related RPMs and re-installed them all, leaving the wierd stuff til last. With each RPM, I restarted apache. Eventually I had all the stuff I needed. Installed it and still it worked.
A little clean up of my conf file conglomeration and I figured I was set.
Then my friend David emailed me to ask when he’d be able to FTP again. Shit.
Seems I’d acquired the same problem with vsftpd as we had at work where it wants to be anonymous-only no matter what the config says. So I googled and found a message board thread discussing the problem. Vsftpd apparently needs to be reacquainted with its config file when it’s being run through xinetd.
David hasn’t emailed me back to say it’s working, but it should be. Maybe he’s gone to bed. Maybe I should too.
The best bit was spending the last 15 minutes trying to get the story on the site. I could log in, get the admin menu, but every time I tried to save it, it told me “access denied.”
It seems geeklog doesn’t actually work with register globals off. Sigh. Its days are looking numbered.
