Thursday, July 23, 2009

A few recent changes and improvements

The last days I have done a few changes, which might not be visible to you, but I'll list it here anyway:

- updated to FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE, so that we have ZFS version 13 instead of version 6, which was the first ZFS version imported to FreeBSD.

- upgraded Apache from 1.3 to 2.2.11 ITK. I also configured KeepAlive with a short timeout (it's faster and cheaper to take more requests per connection), and set a max limit for simultaneous clients on specific virtual hosts where this had been a problem (ITK lets us set this per virtual host and not just for the whole server).

- fixed the serial console to the server. I also use a Real Weasel in use, but it's nice to have a non screen-scraping console free of bugs.

- fixed the startup scripts starting Amavis (the spam prevention system in use) so that they actually work. There were some issues here due to the order things need to happen: 1) get ZFS filesystems mounted, 2) mount devfs filesystems, 3) start the Totem jail, 4) start Amavis. Recently this has made mail deliveries freeze for hours or even days until I discovered everything was not up and running.

- upgraded the Totem "backup" server, which normally just does DNS and MX (receive emails) and gives me the console access to the Totem machine. But this machine could now run the Totem jail if necessary, at least for some time. But it's a little slow (it's an Intel Atom system).

- moving of the Nagios monitoring completed. It was running from a machine I needed to discontinue. In the process I wasn't paying too much attention, which also helped lead do mail delivery freezes. But that is over now.

In other words: things could be faster and more stable, and it'll be easier for me to fix and keep things running well.

Next question up is: do we remove our Squirrelmail webmail, and go for the new one (Roundcube)? I suppose we might need to change IMAP server and/or mailbox format then, due to performance issues. I'll think about it.