Utilising old desktops around the office

Geoff Jacobs — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:27:00 +0000

So over the years, we have some old desktops in the office which aren’t really good enough to use for development any more. I’ve started breathing new life into them by using them to backup our Subversion repositories by using svnsync.
By setting up cron jobs to sync every x minutes or even hours you can have a huge amount of redundancy for next to no cost.
The read only mirrors are also handy for other applications that create load on your repositories (build servers etc) so I use a near real-time mirror to run trac and our Bamboo server from.

Erratic Sendmail problems…

Geoff Jacobs — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:33:00 +0000

I’ve recently installed Drupal 6, and was having problems sending out emails (specifically for new users and password resets).
The problem was that sometimes the mail was coming through, and other times it wasn’t (it didn’t even appear in our mail server logs).
After lots of scouting around, I noticed that in /var/log/maillog (on FC6), the relay kept on changing.
On our network, we have 3 domain controllers, one of which is a mail server. Send mail was using it’s “Smart” relay to figure out where to relay the mail through, but unfortunately it kept finding whichever domain controller replied first, rather than just the mail server. This meant that sometimes, when it got the mail server, the email would come through, and other times it wouldn’t.
To fix the problem, I had to edit the “Smart” relay host in:

/etc/mail/sendmail.cf

I searched for “DS” and came across a section such as:

# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DS

I changed this to read

# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DSmail.domain.com

where mail.domain.com is the name of the mail server.
Then I restarted the sendmail service using:

service sendmail restart

and everything started working!

Geoff's Blog » sysadmin

Utilising old desktops around the office

Erratic Sendmail problems…