Mail

Kiwi ran out of disk space and memory (perhaps running out of disk space resulted in no room for the swap file to grow?) around 1 am PST this morning. Upgraded both and brought back online around 6:45pm PST.

Web sites (except Gallery and Wiki) and mail were down. Everything should be back to normal now.

Websites (other than wiki and gallery) and mail were out a few hours this evening (approx 4:00 - 7:15 p.m. PDT ). They’re hosted on kiwi, which locked up and needed to be restarted. Unlike the December outage, this time it was just kiwi and not the parent Xen host. Root cause unclear. Spam Assassin was churning through a bunch of spam at the time, but that could be a random correlation.

Websites (other than wiki and gallery) and mail were out a couple times this afternoon. The parent Xen host crashed twice and was rebooted by RimuHosting. Sigh. Hopefully it’ll stay up this time.

Update 12-25: I must have jinxed it. Host continued to have issues and was out overnight. (Sleigh riding with Santa?) Seems to be back up now after a Xen upgrade.

The CA certificate used for all nerdylorrin.net secure communication expired at the end of June. As a result you may have noticed security warnings popping up when accessing mail, WebDAV, or SSL protected web pages. A new CA certificate good through 2017 is now available. See the SSL Certificate instructions on how to update.

I’ve signed up for a hosted server since that’s quite a bit cheaper than any of the options for upgrading the internet connection here. It will be a while before I’ve migrated all the services over. My current plan is to move mail first and then move the web sites one domain at a time.

The new host doesn’t have enough disk space for the Gallery. If you’ve got some online disk space to share, please let me know.

From Friday 11/10 through Friday 11/17 some email messages passing through nerdylorrin.net were bounced back to the sender.

nerdylorrin.net lives in my basement attached to a Comcast cable modem. Sending mail from Comcast is difficult! Normally mail servers directly contact the destination mail server to transmit the email. Unfortunately many mail servers refuse direct connections from Comcast subscribers because the ratio of spambots to real mail servers is too high. I had been relaying mail through Comcast’s official mail server to avoid this problem. But Comcast’s mail server didn’t like the volume of mail it was receiving from nerdylorrin.net.

Chuck has generously offered to let me route mail through his server (which lives in a real data center). This resolves the problem since Chuck’s server has neither the spam stigma of a Comcast subscriber nor the quotas of Comcast’s official mail server. Thanks Chuck!

Affected messages unfortunately can’t be retrieved since they were bounced back to the original sender without going through nerdylorrin.net again. The total number of affected messages appears to have been small. Apologies for any headaches this caused.

Until now all mail domains hosted here shared a single address space. For example, johndoe@nerdylorrin.net and johndoe@yourdomain.org had to go to the same mailbox. That limitation is now removed. You can now have whatever aliases you want!

If you want to add any aliases to your domain just let me know. As always, these can forward to an email account hosted elsewhere or can go to a mailbox hosted here.

The mail server is now filtering spam at receipt time. This means all mail services, including forwarding accounts and mailing lists, are protected.