[Lust] Anyone on this listed interested in a day or so's consulting work (Debian)?

[Andrew Hougie]

Dear George

Thank you for your reply.  Sorry for the delay in replying.

I have a (hard-wired) home network which includes three Windows workstations (in my study, in my wife's study and in the living room for general use) on a private network which in turn is connected to two identical Linux (Debian) servers (with public IP addresses) (romulus and remus) connected to the internet through a 2MB broadband connection.  There will also shortly be a networked printer (i.e. with its own network interface) on the private network. 

My servers provide DNS and MX service (using sendmail) and Apache webservers for my domains and those of certain friends and family, including Squirrelmail for external email access.  Once upon the time I had the time and expertise to run and configure these myself (originally slackware, then SuSE).

I access my own email using Mozilla Thunderbird and IMAP.  My wife accesses her email using Eudora and POP3.  In addition my mother receives email via my servers and accesses them through POP3 and certain other friends and relatives receive email forwarded to them via my servers.

All email is filtered through spamassassin and spamass-milter (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/spamass-milt/).  I'm currently using version 0.2.0 of spamass-milter and version 0.3.0 has appeared.  Version 0.3.0 is also available in Debian's "unstable" distribution, but I'm not sure if mine was not originally compiled from source (and then I hacked it in accordance with the author's instructions to work for spamassassin 3).  I don't think version 0.3.0 makes many other big changes. 

The servers also include file shares for the internal network using Samba.

Actually that is more of a description of what should happen, since only romulus is working.  Remus never got properly configured before the consultant "disappeared".  I then accidentally pressed the power off button on the mains while remus was doing its file check as part of a reboot and from then on it has refused to boot (clearly some sort of filesystem error, but I do not know what).

I am technically not incompetent, but do not have the time to spend working out how to deal with each problem.  What I am therefore looking for is someone to take the time:

1)	getting remus working and configured again;
2)	getting rsync (or something like it) running so that romulus backs up the shares and email onto remus
3)	arranging the two servers so that if romulus goes down remus will pick up as near seamlessly as possible and
4)	putting together a script (or some similar proposal) on CDROM so that if I need to reload romulus or remus again (either because of a system crash like the present or if I am doing a dist-upgrade and want to start from a clean slate) I can

Set out at the bottom of this message are some other more minor matters.

Is this something you could do and would be interested in doing and, if so, what would you propose by way of timing and charges.  
Perhaps you could also tell me something more about yourself.

Many thanks
best wishes
Andrew

(Radlett Herts)

More minor matters:

*	instructions (or config files) for compiling new kernels (including an Iomega Peerless (firewire) "hack" - the hack is already there and (I think) works

*	sorting a backup routine onto the Iomega Peerless external harddrive

*	I am not sure the kernel has been updated for the mremap() flaw

*	there is no icon for the DVD-RW - I understand this is because there is no entry in the fstab file

output of dmesg gives:
hdc: _NEC DVD_RW ND-1300A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: ASUS CD-S520/A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive


* 	the console on remus was (before it crashed) displaying a string of "eth0: Oversized ethernet frame spanned multiple buffers" messages

* 	romulus received an axfr request for a couple of my domains from 193.0.0.63 (which appears to be hostcount.ripe.net) which it denied. Remus received the same requests and sent them. There was no "allow-transfers" section in remus' /etc/bind/named.conf. I assume there should be?

*	I think I've got some of the spamassassin permissions wrong and this could do with looking at (as well as the users that spamassassin etc runs as)

*	On remus (before it crashed) there was a problem with spamassassin that resulted in an error message spewing out saying:

Failed to run BALANCE_FOR_LONG SpamAssassin test, skipping: ^I(Can't
locate object method "check_for_very_long_text" via package
"Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus" (perhaps you forgot to load
"Mail::SpamAssassin::PerMsgStatus"?) at
/usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/PerMsgStatus.pm line 2086, <GEN9> line
19. )

This was originally a problem on romulus and theconsultant fixed it and never told me how.


*	The previous consultant put the Apache log files in rather unhelpful places - I'd rather they were (for the "users'" servers in /home/[username]/logs, and then logrotate and a log analyser (I like webmin (which is running on romulus) and webmin has a module for webalizer, so that's a possible) needs to be configured accordingly 

*	I compiled webmin from source on romulus, and update it using webmin rather than apt-get, because we could not get it to co-exist with mod-ssl when both were installed from debian packages.  This exercise has not been done on remus.



George G. Bolgar wrote:

> Andrew,
>
> I am a contractor with extensive (over 2 decades) in various roles 
> within IT.
>
> Would you like to tell me more about the nature of this consultation 
> you require.
>
> Regards,
>
> George G. Bolgar
>
> Andrew Hougie wrote:
>
>> Sorry to post to the list, but I'm looking for someone who might be 
>> willing to do some consulting work, probably around a day, in the 
>> Radlett area?  Is anyone on this list interested?  Is please email me 
>> off list.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Andrew
>>
>>
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