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Cybercity had operational problems on 18 August. I realized it when I was unable to update my computers. The phone was down too as it also is powered by Cybercity in form of VoIP.
First I thought that it was the rather unstable Zyxel router delivered by Cybercity that ones again was unwilling to cooperate. But no matter what I did I couldn't get out of the house. I chose to go to my neighbor that was were kind to let me use their computer and Internet. One noisy beast of a computer, but to each their own. It was running Windows, but that is also not my business. Whereas everything is a quick visit at Cybercity's website showed that they were having operational problems that could affect some customers and giving them unstable Internet and phone. Very well.
Although I didn't actually have time for it, I took this unchosen downtime to do a few changes on the server. I had for some time planed to change the hard drive to a smaller one and to install Arch Linux instead of Debian on it. Why I change to Arch I will come back to another time.
So I took the server down to do those things now when the connection was gone anyway. But as always things takes longer time than you estimate. Not less so as I was also doing some maintenance on my aquariums.
Of natural courses I couldn't install all the programs on the server before the connection came back, but I did what I could do on the 18Th. The 19Th the connection was back and I went to install the rest.
Then I ran into my first minor or half-big problem, depending on how you look at it. It drove me nuts for some hours. Arch is different than Debian in that Arch actually uses /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny for something, which Debian does not. Therefore I was unable to receive the emails I did sent to test the mail server. Luckily I found the solution, but not before I had minimized the configuration file of Exim so much that I just had to work. I had to allow access to Exim in /etc/hosts.allow. Obvious now but I had previously tried both smtp and smtpd without luck, which in my brain was the most logical. I found the solution on Arch Linux Forums
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It also took more time to setup the server because I suddenly had to decide how I wanted to handle the users, something I had put out for some time. It took time to argument for and against the solutions I could think of using. But just before midnight, local time, the 20Th the email- and web-server-part was working again.
The contents was last modified on 19 May 2009, at 16:46 (CEST)