Tag Archives: servers

SugarSync

For some reason, I was sure that S3 was an end-user file storage service. It’s not. It’s for web developers who need somewhere to store a large amount of data for back-ending their website. So, say, someone like Flickr might use S3 for the actual photo storage. (I don’t know if they do. Just an example.)

So, thanks to a suggestion from CGNaughton, I am now using SugarSync, which was remarkably easy to set up, and seems to work pretty well, although it took three days for the initial sync of my data.

I’m also planning to put the 24G of photos, which I have on an aging Linux box at home, up on SugarSync, which will likely take all weekend. Once that’s done, I will finally shut down Buglet, which I have operated out of my house for more than ten years now, and I will then have a total of *zero* servers in my home, for the first time in probably fifteen years.

Having my servers managed, and, in particular, backed up, by someone else, has an awful lot of appeal. It’s no longer fun to keep servers updated, patched, backed up, free of dust, and restarted every time there’s a power dip.

On a related note, if you’re in the Lexington area, and you need a half-dozen aging server machines, come and get them. We’re only too delighted to offload them. Most of them were great machines in their time, but I no longer have need of them. Monitors too.

Servers, then and now

Server Room, Then
Then (2005) (And there’s at least 2 others that aren’t shown here, because they’re over on the desk.

My servers, now
Now (2008)

Apparently my priorities have shifted a little in the last few years. It no longer seems like a lot of fun to maintain a bunch of dusty noisy hardware that could fail any moment. And I’ve got slightly better use for the space, too.

And some folks tell me that “normal” people (whatever that means) don’t have *any* servers in their house. I find that hard to believe.

Back on the air

The saga so far:

Cooling fan started to go out in server (Riesling), and CPU overheating caused the machine to power off. So, I rigged up several additional fans, including a large floor fan, and tried to limp by for a bit. Meanwhile, purchased replacement machine (Cabernet) and started to migrate.

Email was, as usually, the most complicated part of the process. I moved the cyrus mailbox files over, but cyrus didn’t pick up on them. I eventually had to manually createfolder and reconstruct each of the 250+ folders. Fortunately, a little scripting took most of the pain out of this step, once I figured out what I needed to do.

Last night, the server finally gave up the ghost, and the CPU melted.

For reasons not yet ascertained, my secondary MX (Brunello), which has been receiving email when it couldn’t be delivered here, can no longer make connections to my new server. IP address hasn’t changed. Other mail servers out there can connect to me, and the secondary MX server can connect on other ports. The way I figure it, while things were broken, some automated security thingy at $ISP triggered, and blocked port 25 from that source. However, the tech support folks at $ISP are trained to speak to normal people, rather than geeks like myself, so everything that he suggested was not only unhelpful, but completely irrelevant.

So, Brunello can connect to Cabernet on any port *except* 25. Any other machine in the world can connect to Cabernet on port 25. Neither Cabernet, nor my router, see the inbound connection (tcpdump and friends), indicating that it’s getting blocked a hop upstream.

Today, I stayed home because I have, I believe, the Vesuvian Death Flu, or some variant thereof, and am coughing up a lung every 2 minutes or so. I’ve put Riesling’s hard drive in Shiraz, and have been copying files over much of the morning. Very exciting to watch, no doubt. So far, I have my website back up, but very little else.