Server repairs completed

It has been a challenging few days due to a series of hardware failures. I had two systems that were complete failures two with minor problems and one that might be easily fixable. But the server is back up and running so email and my web site are functional again.

It all started last week when my old server crashed due to an intermittently failing hard drive. I managed to get that back up and running temporarily with a bit of luck and a complete BIOS reset. I was able to keep it running long enough to choose a spare host and move DHCP, DNS, NTP, and firewall services to it.

While I was working to move additional services to my new server, the motherboard on my wife’s computer failed so I took some time to replace that. Of course the motherboard on that system was so old that the only option was to go with a new motherboard, CPU, memory, and a power supply that could deal with an Intel i7 1151 hexa-core processor.

After fixing my wife’s system and getting a good bit of work done to move web services and email to my new server, the old one died permanently.

It took me a couple days to get web and email up and running on the new server because I was moving from CentOS 6 to Fedora 29 which included updates to both Sendmail and Apache. It took a bit of research but I was able to determine that the fix for each were minor changes to obscure configurations for the newer versions of those services.

Both web and email are complex installations. My web site uses Apache web server and WordPress with a MySQL (MariaDB) back-end database. For email I use Sendmail with SpamAssassin and MimeDefang for spam filtering. The good news is that a simple restore from backups of the data and everything was up and running – you do make backups, don’t you?

I apologize if you tried to send me email or visit one of my web sites and were unable to get through. If you send me email between January 21 and today and did not receive an expected reply, please let me know and I will respond as soon as possible.

Thanks.