Core Services

Author: doachs

  • Network weirdness

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    doachs

    Just after about 6pm tonight we experienced some network weirdness. I wish I could say I knew what happened and what fixed it, but I can’t. All I know is that people mentioned error messages about duplicate ip addresses on the network and I could see lots of broadcast traffic. Most likely caused by some…

  • Keeping our Mac’s patched

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    doachs

    In an effort to keep all the Apple OS X Mac’s on campus patched and running all the latest and greatest software, we had to come up with a good way to remotely manage them. Apple’s Remote Desktop app comes in very handy and helps, but we wanted a more scriptable way to do it…

  • gustavus.edu dissappeared

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    doachs

    For a little while this morning gustavus.edu was unreachable. As a result people on and off campus were not able to access the Gustavus homepage (www.gustavus.edu)and possibly not receive email to @gustavus.edu addresses. @gac.edu email and websites were not having issues. The problem was fixed at about 9:30am this morning.

  • Secondary DNS servers and subdomains

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    doachs

    Here at Gustavus we have a lot of subdomains. For example my computer is oachs.it.gac.edu. A little while ago we noticed that our secondary / slave DNS provider could not resolve DNS for any host in any of our subdomains. As it turns out, the solution was to add a couple of lines to our…

  • New Homepage Server

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    doachs

    We have switched homepages.gac.edu over to a new faster server so that at some point in the future we can offer PHP and MySQL to everyone. But for now, if you notice any odd behavior with homepages.gac.edu, please let us know.

  • Email

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    doachs

    Just reading the usual blogs tonight and just had to say I agree with what this one says: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7907 Unfortunately email is no where near as reliable as we would like. Even people who know better loose email due to virus filters and the like. In fact, it even happened here this past weekend 🙂

  • Bye Bye Solen

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    doachs

    This morning at about 7:45am, we pulled the network connection from solen.gac.edu and turned on a different server with that IP address. The new server then listens for requests going to solen’s IP address and redirects the services Solen used to perform to their appropriate location. We will be monitoring who is connecting to this…

  • Spamassassin Changes

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    doachs

    It appears as though our current spamassassin setup is adding a significant amount of load on our home directories. As a result I am looking into ways to keep spamassassins current effectiveness while reducing the load it places on the disk drives of the home directories. Over the next few days I will be making…

  • Lots of students

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    doachs

    As you probably already know, Gustavus accepted a few too many students this year. That means more students, staff, and facutly than usual. Which for us means more email, more internet usage, and more network traffic in general. At the last minute they had to convert many open spaces in to new dorm rooms. That…

  • Postifx and LDAP issues

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    doachs

    Apparently when our LDAP servers are under a bit of load such as when we do a batch update of info and the indexing is slowing things down, our postfix mailserver rejects email saying “status=bounced (unknown user: “username”)”. Which sucks because the person who sent the email will get that bounce message back. In an…