I've got mail
A week ago the power went out here at Chez Splicer. Believe me, I was not happy to be dragged out of bed by the sound of the UPS. Well, I got to my beloved RS/6000 Model 250 and shut it down properly before the UPS died, but for some unknown reason it wouldn’t come back on in the morning.
IBM built those things like Mack trucks. So actually I spent the last week just trying to get the case off the machine to look at the insides. In the meantime, I’ve had no email.
The first thing I did was to blow out all the dust using compressed air. The next thing was reseat the memory chips. Now the system is up again and email for me is working. But anyone who has emailed me in the last seven days has gotten a bounce message. Sorry about that.
My mailing lists have been down the whole time too.
This whole thing makes me question the wisdom of running my own mailserver. Especially a mailserver running 13-year-old hardware. But you know, I had 190 days uptime on this box before the power went out. And I had over 180 when I shut it down to move it into the new apartment. Still, week-long gaps in service bring me to a “one nine” environment. Beware the amateur sysadmin.