Light Blogging and Geekly Duties
So I’m kind of busy and am likely not to be posting much in the next day or so. Having been otherwise occupied the past couple Saturdays, I set out to do some work this one to beef up the billings for the month, since this is the do or die “shop for an apartment” money.
Originally this would have been “routine maintenance,” going around to machines, seeing if any of them were infested, scanning, that sort of thing. It will probably still be some of that. However, yesterday things went haywire on the network. When I left last night, internet e-mail still wasn’t working in the most baffling of ways.
Basically, there’s an Exchange server, which is a new machine with Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 5.5, which was formerly on a Windows NT4 backup domain controller (BDC) machine that has a dying drive in its RAID array. Then there’s an NT4 member server that is a proxy server hooked to the internet via 512K of T-1 line. Any e-mail at their domain passes through to the proxy and is handled by the Exchange internet mail connector (IMC). Mail from their Exchange server flows the other way. These take the form of oddly named files that sit in “out” and “in” directories and, once processed, then move to “archive” directories.
On the proxy, Sybari Antigen with Spam Manager runs, scanning everything that comes in and purging out spam based on Sybari’s engine. Sybari Antigen also runs for virus scanning, using engines from several antivirus vendors, on the Exchange server. Sybari is fantastic. Lately, though, it seems to have been the source of the mail in and out of the place choking up.
Anyway, all has been mostly okay, except the fact that Outlook Web Access won’t work with the new server, apparently because it is not - and can’t be as long as the network is run by NT - a BDC. At least, that’s my guess, though the actual error is a script timeout, which would match the periodic RPC errors generated by ordinary communications and mail transfers between the two servers. Oh, and the fact that communications with the fast new mail server are sluggish from Outlook on the workstations, in a way it never was before.
I had disabled Exchange on the old mail server, but left it online doing nothing but authentications in its role as a BDC. Figured it could manage that, degraded drive or not.
Yesterday morning people came in and found that for maybe half of them, things worked fine, and for the rest of them, everything on the network was sluggish, hanging, even not working at all. It took until after 11:00 for them to bring this to my attention. Once again, my Spidey sense was tingling and I wasn’t paying attention. When I woke up at 8:30, I had an inexplicable compulsion to hurry and get to the office (in the same building), even though I had other plans for the day. This almost invariably happens to me when something is going wrong there.
I’m still not 100% sure what the source of the problem was, or even that it’s completely resolved or will remain so. I ended up having everyone shut down their computers, then I shut down every server in logical order, then I reset the power to the network hubs, then I powered the servers back up in logical order, then had people come back up and try it. My theories were it was a hub problem, or it was an authentication problem centered around the old mail server’s BDC role, or both. None of the people who were working okay had been logged on by that server. I left the old mail server off, letting the remaining one BDC and the PDC handle the logins.
During the rest of the day, I continued to see timeout and recovery messages from Sybari Spam Manager. Antigen had been updated on the new mail server, but not on the proxy server. So around 5:00 I upgraded Sybari Antigen with Spam Manager, stopped the mail connector service, purged the accumulated log and mail files, rebooted, and… nothing.
As far as I can tell, everything is as it should be. The internet connection is there. The servers are working. No mail packets flow into the IMC “in” folder from outside the building. No mail packets flow into the IMC “out” folder from the Exchange server. No test e-mails get through in either direction. Weirder, Antigen has claimed to find things to clean up. Including spam. From outside. Despite my other problem being that the product now shows no option for the spam scanning engine downloads. Even though the spam scanning option exists.
So this is what I have to fix today, first and foremost. I have no idea what’s wrong, but that’s how I often start out when troubleshooting. This morning I even went so far as to run NSLOOKUP and see if the MX record had changed.
Sorry, didn’t mean to geek out and go into so much detail. It helps me focus to write about it, though. Sometimes I’ll e-mail Deb about something I’m working on and doing so will give me the solution, or the direction in which to proceed.
That is why I expect to be minimally available for blogging, possibly all weekend, depending what I get myself into and how it goes. Which is sad, because there’s a lot I want to, and have been wanting to, post about besides the “all Sadie, all the time” routine you’ve been getting.
The fix is trivially simple. A *nix POPmail server and Eudora for all the clients. I’m not generally a fanatic about this, but Outlook is the worst-written commercial program I’ve ever used and I have no reason to believe Exchange is any better. There are Windows programs out there to meet the needs of the three people who actually use the calendar function.
Posted by triticale on 07/30 at 10:21 PMExcept it’s a LAW FIRM and everyone there uses the calendar intensively. If e-mail went down for a week, they could deal. If they lost the schedules, forget it.
Posted by Jay on 07/30 at 11:03 PMDo a search under images on google for “poor white trash” and see that you precious baby girl shows up on the first page. This is an outrage. Here is where you can complainn and should:
http://www.search-marketing.info/search-engines/report-spam.htmI wanted a photo to send to a Czech language student who wanted to know what this idiom meant and it certainly is not you rbaby girl.
Posted by Ruffmaster on 07/30 at 11:07 PM
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