When good intentions turn bad

Monday, October 04 2010 @ 08:34 PM EST

 If anyone is wondering what the heck happened to the weather graphs recently I can explain.  I have been a busy boy and moved all my email hosting to Google Apps.  This is a good thing and has NOTHING to do with the gaps in the graphs.  However, the mail hosting move triggered a chain reaction of me shooting myself in the foot.  The sequence of events went something like this:

1. Migrate mail hosting - w00t!  Everything went well :)
2. Users can't get their mail clients configured.  Bummer, time to do some remote take-over-their-desktop type wrangling.  All fixed...good!
3. Remove old mail server packages from my server at home.  This went well in fact - bye Zimbra and Mailscanner, you've been good friends.
4. Decide that with the smaller task-footprint on the server, I might as well upgrade it from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04.
5. Here ends my weekend! Gah!!
6. What broke: database, monitoring, backups, mail relay, web proxy, DNS, DHCP, UPnP media server, weather station duties.
7. Fixing #6 has taken me all day Monday!!  Grr.

The good news is that I'm pretty sure everything is back to normal albeit with a few gaps in the trend monitoring for the weather station.  Sorry.

Update: Wednesday 6th October @ 13:53

Spoke too soon.  After "fixing" the system it turns out the term "fix" was more like "neuter"!  I got this great idea to lock down some files on the server that contain sensitive info, like username and passwords to databases.  The problem is the code that does all the graph generation magic couldn't READ the damned files after I "fixed" them (I'm an idiot...should've seen THAT coming!).  Alas, the permissions are now fixed properly and the result is about a 24hr gap in the trend monitoring.  Moral to the story: when locking down your system, decide if you're doing for anality or for a real reason.  In my case, it was the former, and I paid :(

Comments (0)

The Gray Matter
http://gray.net.au/article.php/2010100401