Fucking Spammers

Update time.

I got into work today and found that the mail server had just come up after *half a fucking hour* of being down because of the insane load placed on it by spam -- just spam -- coming in. The owner of the company couldn't send email. I started setting up the new mail server.

And it was nice. I got to go away, away from the help desk, sit down and figure out how to make it work. FreeBSD's vinum + Promise raid controller == kernel panic (details later on). Finally got vinum figured out -- I've only worked w/it once before -- and before I was grabbed back to help desk had the disk setup about 80% done.

So some more details: there's 4 x 40GB maxtor IDE drives. (Yeah yeah yeah SCSI.) We've got an onboard Promise controller chip; I'll put in the mobo tomorrow and make this all seamless. First it turns out we've got the Promise Lite (Less Filling!) BIOS, which means we can only have one (1) array of two disks; the other two disks can be single arrays on their own, which is useful in some alternate universe I'm sure. So okay, try setting up one mirrored (Raid 1? 0? I can't keep 'em straight) array, and we'll use vinum to tie it together with the other single drives...

Only as soon as I try using vinum to do _anything_ with the Promise'd arrays, BANG: kernel panic. This is 4.6, not the latest (4.7RC1 as I type), but still. Arghh. Doesn't matter whether vinum tries raid 0, 1 or 5 -- just panics right away. If I had more time and a box of my own to fool around with, I'd try [Michael Lucas'|http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/03/21/Big_Scary_Daemons.html] SlashdotJournal_25September2002-02 (Buy his book!) and contribute something useful to the FreeBSD folk. Alas, it's not my box or my time, and if I were to post this message to freebsd-hackers-important-vinum-people tomorrow I'd (deservedly) get laughed at so hard I'd feel it over the ether.

Anyway. Point is I can't get vinum to play nice w/the Promise'd chip even as an IDE controller. The BIOS of the box allows you to turn the Promise chip on, off, or to ATA/IDE; but even set to the latter, it panics once vinum touches /dev/ar*. You have been warned.

So get vinum using the four drives on the first two IDE channels, and that works fine once I learn the intricacies of disklabel (set type to vinum, kids!) and vinum init (and that takes a long time w/3*35GB partitions^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^subsooperplexen). 1 5m 5o 133t!

OT: One of my side notes was going to be about how I'm posting this w/Lynx 'cos Mozilla won't let me use vi, editor of the Elder Gods, as an editor. Then I realized I could have just fired up a shell and used vi in there. Sigh. Rumours of my cleverness have been exaggerated.

Original entry.