Some Services Restored

The ISP has replaced the server’s harddrive and has reinstalled Debian on it. The old harddrive is still attached, but the filesystem is trashed. I’ve got a bajillion files in the lost+found directory with completely meaningless numerical file names. I’ll see what I can do with this mess, but it’s gonna take some time.

In the meantime, here’s the status of what I’ve restored so far:

Accounts

Most accounts that appeared to be active at the time of the disk failure have been restored. Home directories and email folders are semi-restored. If you have an okcomputer.org account that you are interested in maintaining, please try to login to serenity.okcomputer.org via SSH (or at least by SquirrelMail) to confirm the status of your password, files and email folders.

E-mail

All e-mail functionality has been restored, including IMAPS, SMTP and SMTP STARTTLS AUTH. SquirrelMail is tested and functional, as is MUA access using Mozilla Thunderbird.

Also, I’ve started rejecting obvious spam (SpamAssassin score >= 12) at the gateway. I tried this in the past and had some problems with false positives, so I’m being extra careful this time around. Already rejected 412 in the last 48 hours. This isn’t the best set-up, but it’s at least RFC compliant and nothing gets bit-bucketed. If you’re still getting spam in your inbox you can use procmail to filter on the SpamAssassin mark-up, or you can use SpamAssassin or bogofilter on your own. (I’ll try to provide details later.)

Photo Gallery

I really hope you all didn’t use okcomputer.org as the the only repository for your photographs, but if you did I’ve made some progress recovering the JPEG’s on the old filesystem. Last night (10/22/2007) I recovered 8822 digital photographs (7.3G) and sorted them out into directories based on the model of camera they came from (as taken from the EXIF tags). Photos can be found here for the time being.

The last “back-up” of the OK Computer Photo Gallery occurred in May 2005, right before we relocated to Louisville. I’ve restored the Gallery from this back-up. My apologies for all the lost work, but that’s really the best I think I can do with this application.

New Server?

Now that it’s the end of the year and I’ve got a bit of time, I’ve started building a new okcomputer.org server with RAID1 disk mirroring. Yes, you heard right — almost a real back-up strategy. I need to do some scouting for a co-location facility, but pretty soon we should be up and running in glorious double-hard-drive stereo.

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