[Gllug] a day in the life of a lazy linux user

[Norton Badrul I A]

hiya folks,

those of you that know me are aware that i like debian and ataris etc, 
some even know that i rescued a Sparc LX from a skip a while back and am 
using it to automatically do nice tape backups of stuff over ssh,

there i was thinking it was all working, well, it did, 24 days backups, 
bash scripts and conjobs email to change the tape after about 1.9gb (i 
have 2gb tapes) etc etc, all nice,

well along came a powercut, doh, little sparc survived just fine, no 
data loss, all nice, came up ok, got its address over dhcp, well, yes it 
got most things, it seems the version of pump that it has decided not to 
create /etc/resolve.conf (bugger) and i only found out today, 'oh dear' 
i thought, oh well, and made one manually and went to upgrade pump in 
the usual apt way, doh, it was the newest version, anyhoo, ill fix this 
later, this wasnt the most amusing thing to have happened,

well, i think its been 12 days since that power outage on the sparc, so, 
its done 12 nightly backups of my uni work (or was supposed to do) well, 
it didnt, you see, it has crond, exim and most other normal stuff you 
expect to install,

exim was set up to send all mail to our mailserver, no local delivery at 
all (mistake #1)

here goes ...

for the last 12 days the ssh backup script had been failing because of 
the nameserver thing

cron sends a mail of the command output

exim cant send it (no nameserver)

exim sends the sender a failure message,

exim cant send the failure message,

exim sends a failure message about the failure message,

keeps doing that lot ....

gives up after 48 hrs of trying each message,

sends a message saying its given up.

...

exim fills the the disk,

exim cant send any more, some of the messages die off from exim but new 
fails are sent to fill up any new space, yay, ive dos'd my own machine 
and didnt notice.

all this for 12 days,

i manage to log in just to see whats up (i discover resolv.conf is broke 
when i try and to apt-get update)

i manually fix it,

exim wakes up and punishes me with 2400 little failure emails in under 
30 seconds

i notice, kill off all of the sparc's exim processes.

i then wrote this email :-)

lesson?

well, i remember noticing the pump problem about 2 months ago, i just 
did my usual manual fix because i was too lazy to find out why it wasnt 
updating resolv.conf, now i plan to not only follow the 'if its not 
broke dont fix' rule but also 'if its broke fix dont bodge'

:-)

bredroll



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