New gnumonks.org mail server online

Recently I pointed out that I'm about to move my personal mail away from KNF. The new server ganesha.gnumonks.org is now co-located at noris.net, where netfilter.org is hosted, too. The netfilter and gnumonks machines are within a private VLAN, with a dedicated firewall in front of them.

Putting that machine in place turned out to be come much more difficult than expected. It seems that Intel recently decided to give their e100/e1000 chips new PCI device ID's, which in turn means that old (e.g. Debian woody install kernels ) Linux drivers don't recognize them. So in the end I had to install SuSE into a swap partition and debootstrap the system from there. *sigh*.

Thanks to the noris.net crew for their assistance, I know they spent way too much time with me considering I bought their smallest entry-level housing product.

moving gnumonks.org mail/web/ftp server

After being hosted in the basement of my former office, connected via an SDSL line to KNF, I have now made the decision to move my mail/web/ftp server to a commercial hosting center.

Connectivity behind that old line was becoming increasingly unreliable due to various problems at the University of Erlangen, which is part of my upstream routing path.

Unfortunately the old gnumonks.org machines are all desktop/mini-tower systems, so I now have to buy an expensive 19" 2U server. It will be hosted at noris network, where the netfilter.org machines are hosted, too.

Started using fedora legacy

Since RedHat decided to discontinue RedHat Linux, I've migrated almost all the remaining RedHat and Conectiva Linux boxes to Debian.

However, I didn't migrate the Fedora Legacy as a means for installing security updates for the discontinued RedHat. Works like a charm, and I send many kudos to those volunteers who set this up in a very short time.

KNF blog section started

I'm planning to drop here some notes about my work at KNF, a non-for-profit Internet organization based in my old home town Nuernberg. Despite not living there anymore, I'm still doing sysadmin for them, especially maintaining our large usenet server.