Entries in Life

Here is a facinating story about falling off a cliff and surviving.

Jeff and I are trying to make a go of everyhost.com. There seem to be a ton of hosting services, but I think low prices, good service, and word-of-mouth will do wonders. That, and the fact that Jeff hasn't been able to find work convienent to where he lives.

But, I've also got a lot of work I need to get done on the house before Christmas, when my parents are coming down. So I've told Alexis that I'll work on everyhost.com until Thanksgiving and then I'll work on the house.

So, what needs to be done to get everyhost up and running? Jeff has a lot of the front-end stuff going, so we don't need to worry about that, but some of what he wants to do is dependent on the backend — the stuff of sysadmin work.

• Install 2.4.13 kernel with reiserfs quota patches. I've got reiserfs going on the system with 2.2.19 kernel, but there doesn't seem to be quota patches availible for the 2.2 kernels. That, and I read over at Linux Weekly News that they finally got the Memory Management working properly under 2.4.12 .
• Complete Cyrus authentication off of SASL/LDAP. The default debian package doesn't have the latest Cyrus IMAPd, nor does it have SASL.
• Complete Exim/LDAP mail routing. I've started on this and the basics seem to work. A secondary thing to do is get mailman working with virtual domains. This may be as easy as changing MAILMAN_HOME for every domain.
• Copy over the mod_perl installation from our production server.
• If I have time: install the updated acmemail. This is supposed to have a bunch improvements (like addressbooks) that we want.

I'll try to add more as I think of it, but for now you can see what I've actually accomplished over here.

One of the great things about being a sysadmin is that when a friend needs technical help, you have the resources available to help them out. For example, my church, St Basil's just got a website. It isn't much now, but since I started hosting it here, we have about 50 times as much power available.

I'll be re-designing soon, of course.

Hmmm.... Today, while putting together a Solaris PKG file for NetBackup, I noticed that their installation puts a few files world-writable under /usr/openv/java. Also, it most, if not all, of the java package owned by uid 1055. Yuck! Hey, Veritas! Fix your installation!

BTW, if you are the sysadmin for more than one Solaris box, you would benefit from learning to create installation packages. For a step-by-step recipe, see sunfreeware.com's pkgadd instructions.

I personally, prefer to use Debian's package building utilities and then convert the resulting .deb into a SVR4 installation package using alien. I'll write more on exactly how to do that later.

Hey! Here is a great resource for setting up LDAP-based mail routing for virtual domains under EXIM. That should be very helpful.