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.