Category: Linux

  • Time-lapse of Ice Rink Replacement

    Ice Rink Time-lapse This is a time-lapse video of the Don Roberts ice rink going from the final stages of the 2008 Nobel Conference to the newly repaired ice rink. Earlier this year the cooling system failed and had to be replaced. In this video you can see the removal of the old cooling system…

  • SpamAssassin Performance Issues

    About 9 months ago we started using a MySQL database to store the bayes information for SpamAssassin. At first it worked great. It significantly reduced the load on our disk drives that used to house that information in the users home directories. Over time SpamAssassin became more popular and now it looks like over 3000…

  • Fedora Core 5 and Openldap

    After many hours of trial and error, I was finally able to get openldap on FC5 working the way we need it to.  I noticed that there are a few differences in the way openldap works on FC5 when compared to the way things were on fc4. In the past when using fc4 the database…

  • Gustavus Webadvisor Server

    This afternoon the web services team has changed the links for Webadvisor on the Gustavus home page to point to our new webadvisor server. The new setup consists of two linux servers running apache and tomcat 5, running in a highly available mode such that if the primary server should fail, the secondary server will…

  • System Downtime

    This morning at about 8:00am, one of our servers (meow) had a kernel panic and died.  As a result some services had issues with switching over to our secondary NFS server.  Thus there were problems accessing home directories on some apple computers, viewing homepages on our homepages.gac.edu webserver and checking quotas. By 8:30am, the server…

  • Postifx and Authentication

    After updating one of our 2 postfix mailservers we discovered that some email clients can’t deal with all the authentication options our mailserver presents to them. For example Eudora has an issue if postfix says it can do CRAM-MD5 as in the following example: 250-AUTH PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 LOGIN CRAM-MD5 250-AUTH=PLAIN DIGEST-MD5 LOGIN CRAM-MD5 For some…

  • Horde, IMP, and imapproxy

    So it turns out that the cache in imapproxy that we turned on yesterday has a problem. First of all, it seemed to work great. I think webmail was more responsive and there was a reduced load on our mail disks. However not all was well. It seems like some times when you deleted a…

  • Email performance

    As many people have noticed, email performance during our peak usage time (9:50am-10:20am) has been extremely poor. The main reason we believe is that the disk drives our email inboxes are stored on are just not fast enough. Currently we are using a Sun T3 disk array with a 1Gig cache and 9 fibre-channel disk…

  • Automatic Proxy Settings

    We just figured out that somewhere along the line, we broke automatic proxy configuration stuff. To fix it there are a couple of things we can do. First we added this to our /etc/dhcpd.conf file: option WPAD code 252 = string; option WPAD “http://www.gac.edu/cgi-bin/proxies”; In our old config we had option option-252 “http://www.gac.edu/cgi-bin/proxies”; but that…

  • Email Failure

    For an hour or so today our email server was rejecting email. The server would respond with an error that the account does not exist. It turns out that it could not look up users in LDAP because one of our LDAP servers was having a problem handling the load. The LDAP server thought it…