EPKPhoto's Tidbits

At the risk of showing my computer nerd side, I feel I need to mention that the virtual server running epkphoto.com has passed 100 days of uptime (not being restarted). As quite the bleeding edge Linux user, I'm amazed when I see uptime of this amount. If I managed my servers like a sane administrator, I would probably see uptimes in excess of a year, but my desire for testing the latest and greatest usually implies rebooting on occasion. In this case, my uptime streak is going to end in the next week or so when I upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version (7.10, Gutsy Gibbon). I have been waiting for this release for a number of reasons, not least of which include improved virus scanning speed for my email server and the latest ImageMagick and other packages to run the development version of the website I built for NASA Langley this past summer.

As you can see in the news section on the epkphoto.com main page, Canonical released Ubuntu 7.04 this past week. The Parallels issue I reported was not quite fixed in time for the release, but it looks like the fix will come soon. The unfortunate part is that this will likely affect all Parallels users that try to install Ubuntu in the next six months. At least the upgrade of epkphoto.com to Feisty Fawn went well. All I had to do was run "sudo apt-get install update-manager-core" and "sudo do-release-upgrade" as described on the Ubuntu upgrade page. I only had one hiccup when the upgrade halted due to a lack of memory. After fixing that issue and cleaning things up, the upgrade completed successfully. I altered a bunch of config files, so if you see something wrong with my website, email, etc. let me know! Now I can look to upgrade my other Ubuntu desktop/server at home. I want to wait though, since the computer has not been turned off now for over 152 days! I have to say I love Linux's uptime 🙂 .

Well, as it turns out, the problem I described earlier seems to be due to a lack of memory. MailScanner takes up quite a bit of memory, and when it attempted to start a child process for scanning, memory ran out, so the server killed the process…thus leading to the endless cycle (until memory became available). I'm glad that's over with. Also, I made a small change to the site navigation links on the left. I removed the Services link and added a direct link to my blog (of which this post is a part). That should give more visibility to the WordPress installation on my site and its archive of posts.

Ever since I switched to a new hosting provider in October, I have had full administrative control over my epkphoto.com web and mail server. That has been going great, but…for the life of me, I could not get a decent spam filtering setup working. For some reason, when I enabled MailScanner's spam filtering via SpamAssassin, an endless loop occurred where MailScanner would start up, see that mail was present to scan in the Postfix queue, and then restart. Read the rest of this entry »