Saving away outgoing emails in Exim

In our office we use internet fax by myfax.com who are simply excellent btw. Stay away from the other guys.

Incoming faxes are dropped into a common folder via a bit of procmail script in a common user's home folder. This user has shared folder setup, see my other post on setting up shared folders in this way.

However, from time to time there is a need for staff to see a fax, which has been sent by another colleague. Usually one colleague had to forward the e-mail to the other so they could view it.

Today, I decided that was a small simple issue that could easily be resolved. We use Exim4 as our e-mail transport. Exim4 is excellent, but I find its documentation a little on the terse side. But I persevered and found two blog entries which helped me out immensely.

The first blog explains how to setup a filter file to truly blind copy all outgoing mail from a user to another user. However for Ubuntu users the file setup mentioned will not work. Ubuntu uses the flat-file configuration to make life simpler for user, and it does! So this blog  entry sorts it all out for us.

Now if you'd rather copy it to the shared folder, and your user's have rights you can use the Exim save command documented here. I plopped it through as e-mail and let procmail take care to drop it into the correct box.

I hope you find this of great use to you and if you have other solutions, feel free to let me know by posting below.

Random crash of Backup server

I have been trying to nail down an issue with my backup server. I thought I had solved it with a boot option of noapic , because the server worked fine after this setup. It booted reliably up each time.

Until yesterday, when it did something that it had done before. That is the NIC seems to turn off all by itself and then the OS sort of hangs. Before this point the server had sent out its e-mails and even started a couple of backups. I'm not able to login at the console, so the only option I have is a power off and then a boot.

Checking through the logs reveals nothing. DMESG, syslog, messages reveals nothing. No panic, nothing. All I can see is that after sometime backuppc can no longer ping machines and then backuppc soon stops - perhaps because the server is now hung. Pinging the backup server does not work either, so the server really is locked up.

It is very annoying to say the least. The previous server was rock-solid in this regard. It was extremely slow, but at least it booted and stayed up. This maybe because it had a more modern BIOS than the current unit. Which makes me think I will now have to hunt down a updated BIOS.

This really is the first Ubuntu/Linux unreliability I have had in over four (4) years of using Linux.

If anyone has some place to begin, please don't hesitate to comment. I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server edition. Its only purpose is to run Backuppc and this server is woken by WOL each night to start the backup and then shutsdown early morning when all backups are done.

edit: Just to let you know that this appeared to be a hardware issue and I have switched everything over to the original backup machine. Which is much slower but at least works. I now need to wonder what the problem is.

Fixing the CloneZilla GRUB issue

Yesterday I wrote how I was experiencing some troubles rebooting a system after using clonezilla to clone the current drive onto a fresh HD. The old drive was 11 years old. It probably could have gone on for a couple mor years, but why take a chance.

A lot of the "fixes" for this issue are based on the older GRUB and these commands are simply not available in GRUB 2.0. These fixes ask you to use command like

find /boot/grub/stage1
boot (hd0,0)
setup hd(0)

Those are not there in GRUB 2.0

I managed to fix my issue by getting the machine to boot in a live disk. Well actually I used the older drive as the boot drive and the new drive as the secondary drive. With this setup I mounted the partition where the /boot folder was. In my case it was within the / mount point.

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

And then run the grub-install command as such

grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdb

The process completes and the machine will reboot immediately - meaning that I don't have a chance to shutdown and remove the older drive.

I got the machine up now, but the NIC was not being recognised. It was odd, the card had power, but a lspci did not list it as a device. A quick reseat of the card solved that issue and my machine was back up.

I need to keep this notes for the next machine...the NAS, eeek!