Grumbly bits

Our mailserver has been routinely running out of disk space. Since there's lots of new features that I'd like to implement (most of them boiling down to spam control), and all of those features require me to have a little bit of disk space long enough to install and configure the new feature, I've been planning a server move for a while. Things being what they are (crises, funerals, and the like), that hasn't been my fastest-moving project, but I did order myself a lovely machine for the new mail server. It arrived two weeks ago.

Since we knew we were going out of town, I did NOT want to get too engrossed in this project before we left. John got the operating system installed for me, and I started installing software, but there were tons of other things that needed to be done before we left, so nothing really got configured beyond what was necessary to install the next piece of software. It's not like I was going to move customers over to the new server until we got back, anyway-- I try very hard not to make major changes in my network and then pack up and leave for another state. (I like to think of this as "sane".) Other than the minor annoyance of having to archive some old mail off to a different disk, there was no real rush.

Friday, we got up and Stupid O'Clock in the morning and got on a plane. I neglected to pay attention to my clothing, and ended up walking through the metal detector wearing shorts that had metal buttons. A lot of decorative, heavy, metal buttons. I set off the alarm, and got to spend some quality time with the TSA screener. (Nothing horrid, just a bit of patting down.) The flight itself was uneventful. I was seated next to an 18-month old, but he was cute and quiet and slept for most of the flight, so it could have been much worse. We collected our luggage and headed off to the off-airport parking lot where we left our car.

There, we discovered that John's battery was dead. We're still not sure why-- the headlights were off, the interior lights were off, and all of the doors were closed tightly. But dead it was, and we had to wait for a jump.

On the way back, as we were headed through the McDonald's drive-through (we were afraid to go anywhere where we would have to turn the car off, lest it not start again), Brian called to say that they had been having mail problems all day long (by now it was slightly after 5pm). Of course, no one could get a hold of us, because we were on a plane all day.

An hour drive later to get back to the house, and I spent two hours poking at my mailserver. A bit of housekeeping, and I thought I had the problem licked. Sure, there were still 15,000 messages queued up, but I verified that mail was still able to come in and mail was still able to be delivered, so it was just a matter of letting the server chug through it all. I had a clogging workshop to attend the next day, and my plan had been to drive out to the hotel right after we got back from the airport, so I grabbed my other suitcase (I had even thought to pre-pack before we left!), kissed John goodbye, and left. He confirmed that he was getting new email, albeit slowly.

In my pre-planning, I had called a friend who I knew was going to the workshop and asked if I could share her hotel room. She promised she would add my name to the room so that I could get a key whenever I managed to get there. What I did *not* do was print out directions, and in the intervening week I had managed to forget what I did with the flyer that had the hotel's address. But hey, I knew it was a Holiday Inn with a conference center, and it was in Lansing. I looked up Holiday Inns in Lansing, and found that only one of the listings claimed to be a conference center. I printed out directions to that hotel.

When I got there, they had no record of me, or of Kelly, or of any of the other people I knew were going. They suggested that perhaps I wanted a different Holiday Inn. They were nice enough to give me a map from the hotel I was at to the hotel I wanted to go to. I finally rolled in to the correct hotel around 11pm. Whereupon I found that the hotel had a record of Kelly, but no record of me. I called her cell phone (again; I'd called to try to confirm which hotel it was multiple times, and kept getting voicemail), as well as Shane's cell phone. The hotel clerk called both their rooms. No dice. The hotel clerks let me store my suitcase behind the counter, and I went off to search for someone, anyone, who could let me collapse in a bed.

Around midnight, I found them in the bar, working on their second round of Apple Martinis. By then I needed a drink, so I joined them for the last round. It turns out that the hotel wouldn't let Kelly add me to her room, but they'd "leave a key" for me. Sure enough, when we went back to the front desk, there was a key taped to the printer with my name on it-- 2 feet from where the clerks were standing the entire time we were trying to locate Kelly.

Kelly and I ended up staying up until after 2am, talking and giggling like a couple of 10-year-olds at a slumber party, and that was fun. Fortunately, I had no actual obligations in the morning (Kelly was running the workshop and teaching in the morning), so I could sleep in a bit. I hauled myself up and out of bed in time for the first teach, barely. It took about 5 minutes before I realized that the dance I chose had too many ankle rolls for me to do it without a lot of stretching and warming up first, so I spent the first hour wandering aimlessly and obtaining breakfast. By the end of the third dance, my ankles were killing me, as well as my knees. I ended up leaving at lunch, because I figured that if I stayed, I'd dance, and if I danced much more I wouldn't be able to drive myself home. (This turned out to be very true, since driving stressed my right knee out to the point where I nearly didn't make it home as it was.)

At home, I checked in on my mail server, to see how far it had gotten through its backlog overnight. Instead of the 15,000 messages it had when I left, it had 30,000 messages. Oops. I spent the rest of the weekend bringing up the new mailserver, configuring everything, and moving the users over. I also manually cleaned out over 10,000 messages from the queue, all of them going to users that didn't exist (by "manually" I mean "through judicious use of the grep command" because I'm not clinically insane). My best guess is that one of my customers has a virus, since all 10k of those messages were to the same domain and were corrupted versions of usernames that DO exist.

After moving everything over and letting things settle down, I discovered that some mail was being blocked because the user was "over their quota". Since I didn't remember enabling quotas, I set about removing the restriction. Except that I can't find anywhere that quotas are enabled, or that a specific number is set. No, really-- I went back to the Makefiles of the mail software, and I can't find ANYTHING. Attempts to work around it ended up with all incoming mail being bounced as "Invalid user", which is even worse than a couple of people being over their quota. I'm still trying to find the cause of that, but I can't really do anything to fix it until later in the evening when the mail volume dies down a bit.

So now I'm running on zero energy (I was up until 3am on Saturday night and 1am last night, trying to get mail fixed), with a mailserver that only partially works and is held together with bubble gum and bailing wire, and a bunch of customers who are wildly upset that their mail didn't work on Friday.

And then there's the accounting. See, back in the spring I created a Profit & Loss report in QuickBooks to give to my accountant so that she could figure out our taxes. The P&L said that I had a lot of income. I mean, I LOT. It struck me as far too much (seriously, I'm pretty sure I would remember having an extra $50,000 to spend), so I went poking through bank statements, and found that the numbers were way, way off. My accountant agreed with me that things were wonky, but she didn't know why either. As an aside, this was right after I put my mother in hospice, so as priorities go, tracking down some strange numbers was fairly low. We filed an extension and moved on with our lives. Between us, the accountant and I finally tracked down the source of the discrepancy in mid-August, and it turned out to be "QuickBooks hates statement charges and calculates them differently than invoices." I'd been using statement charges for two+ years, so the fix was to go back through and turn every single statement charge into an invoice instead.

You might think that sounds like rather a lot of boring, time-consuming work. It is. Also, this was August. Remember August? Go ahead, scroll back through my journal if you like. If you're too lazy to do that (I don't blame you), August went like this: John's grandmother dies (August 6, in Rogers City, 4 hours away from us.), my mother dies (August 16), my mother's funeral (August 24), John's grandmother's funeral (August 30, in Rogers City). Needless to say, I didn't get all the time-consuming work done in August. Nor did I get it done in early September, because we had some billing issues that lasted until just a few days before John and I left for a week. But the final, no-more-extensions deadline for filing 2007 taxes is October 15th, and my accountant made it clear that she needs the corrected statements before then. Preferably by last Friday, but I was out of town so she had to cope. I told her that I'd "make it a priority" for today, and I'd get it to her by today or tomorrow. Of course, when I told her that, I didn't realize that I was going to be spending part of the day trying to hold my mailserver together. (I did finally get it done, about an hour ago.)

Today is not so good.

Grumbly bits

Our mailserver has been routinely running out of disk space. Since there's lots of new features that I'd like to implement (most of them boiling down to spam control), and all of those features require me to have a little bit of disk space long enough to install and configure the new feature, I've been planning a server move for a while. Things being what they are (crises, funerals, and the like), that hasn't been my fastest-moving project, but I did order myself a lovely machine for the new mail server. It arrived two weeks ago.

Since we knew we were going out of town, I did NOT want to get too engrossed in this project before we left. John got the operating system installed for me, and I started installing software, but there were tons of other things that needed to be done before we left, so nothing really got configured beyond what was necessary to install the next piece of software. It's not like I was going to move customers over to the new server until we got back, anyway-- I try very hard not to make major changes in my network and then pack up and leave for another state. (I like to think of this as "sane".) Other than the minor annoyance of having to archive some old mail off to a different disk, there was no real rush.

Friday, we got up and Stupid O'Clock in the morning and got on a plane. I neglected to pay attention to my clothing, and ended up walking through the metal detector wearing shorts that had metal buttons. A lot of decorative, heavy, metal buttons. I set off the alarm, and got to spend some quality time with the TSA screener. (Nothing horrid, just a bit of patting down.) The flight itself was uneventful. I was seated next to an 18-month old, but he was cute and quiet and slept for most of the flight, so it could have been much worse. We collected our luggage and headed off to the off-airport parking lot where we left our car.

There, we discovered that John's battery was dead. We're still not sure why-- the headlights were off, the interior lights were off, and all of the doors were closed tightly. But dead it was, and we had to wait for a jump.

On the way back, as we were headed through the McDonald's drive-through (we were afraid to go anywhere where we would have to turn the car off, lest it not start again), Brian called to say that they had been having mail problems all day long (by now it was slightly after 5pm). Of course, no one could get a hold of us, because we were on a plane all day.

An hour drive later to get back to the house, and I spent two hours poking at my mailserver. A bit of housekeeping, and I thought I had the problem licked. Sure, there were still 15,000 messages queued up, but I verified that mail was still able to come in and mail was still able to be delivered, so it was just a matter of letting the server chug through it all. I had a clogging workshop to attend the next day, and my plan had been to drive out to the hotel right after we got back from the airport, so I grabbed my other suitcase (I had even thought to pre-pack before we left!), kissed John goodbye, and left. He confirmed that he was getting new email, albeit slowly.

In my pre-planning, I had called a friend who I knew was going to the workshop and asked if I could share her hotel room. She promised she would add my name to the room so that I could get a key whenever I managed to get there. What I did *not* do was print out directions, and in the intervening week I had managed to forget what I did with the flyer that had the hotel's address. But hey, I knew it was a Holiday Inn with a conference center, and it was in Lansing. I looked up Holiday Inns in Lansing, and found that only one of the listings claimed to be a conference center. I printed out directions to that hotel.

When I got there, they had no record of me, or of Kelly, or of any of the other people I knew were going. They suggested that perhaps I wanted a different Holiday Inn. They were nice enough to give me a map from the hotel I was at to the hotel I wanted to go to. I finally rolled in to the correct hotel around 11pm. Whereupon I found that the hotel had a record of Kelly, but no record of me. I called her cell phone (again; I'd called to try to confirm which hotel it was multiple times, and kept getting voicemail), as well as Shane's cell phone. The hotel clerk called both their rooms. No dice. The hotel clerks let me store my suitcase behind the counter, and I went off to search for someone, anyone, who could let me collapse in a bed.

Around midnight, I found them in the bar, working on their second round of Apple Martinis. By then I needed a drink, so I joined them for the last round. It turns out that the hotel wouldn't let Kelly add me to her room, but they'd "leave a key" for me. Sure enough, when we went back to the front desk, there was a key taped to the printer with my name on it-- 2 feet from where the clerks were standing the entire time we were trying to locate Kelly.

Kelly and I ended up staying up until after 2am, talking and giggling like a couple of 10-year-olds at a slumber party, and that was fun. Fortunately, I had no actual obligations in the morning (Kelly was running the workshop and teaching in the morning), so I could sleep in a bit. I hauled myself up and out of bed in time for the first teach, barely. It took about 5 minutes before I realized that the dance I chose had too many ankle rolls for me to do it without a lot of stretching and warming up first, so I spent the first hour wandering aimlessly and obtaining breakfast. By the end of the third dance, my ankles were killing me, as well as my knees. I ended up leaving at lunch, because I figured that if I stayed, I'd dance, and if I danced much more I wouldn't be able to drive myself home. (This turned out to be very true, since driving stressed my right knee out to the point where I nearly didn't make it home as it was.)

At home, I checked in on my mail server, to see how far it had gotten through its backlog overnight. Instead of the 15,000 messages it had when I left, it had 30,000 messages. Oops. I spent the rest of the weekend bringing up the new mailserver, configuring everything, and moving the users over. I also manually cleaned out over 10,000 messages from the queue, all of them going to users that didn't exist (by "manually" I mean "through judicious use of the grep command" because I'm not clinically insane). My best guess is that one of my customers has a virus, since all 10k of those messages were to the same domain and were corrupted versions of usernames that DO exist.

After moving everything over and letting things settle down, I discovered that some mail was being blocked because the user was "over their quota". Since I didn't remember enabling quotas, I set about removing the restriction. Except that I can't find anywhere that quotas are enabled, or that a specific number is set. No, really-- I went back to the Makefiles of the mail software, and I can't find ANYTHING. Attempts to work around it ended up with all incoming mail being bounced as "Invalid user", which is even worse than a couple of people being over their quota. I'm still trying to find the cause of that, but I can't really do anything to fix it until later in the evening when the mail volume dies down a bit.

So now I'm running on zero energy (I was up until 3am on Saturday night and 1am last night, trying to get mail fixed), with a mailserver that only partially works and is held together with bubble gum and bailing wire, and a bunch of customers who are wildly upset that their mail didn't work on Friday.

And then there's the accounting. See, back in the spring I created a Profit & Loss report in QuickBooks to give to my accountant so that she could figure out our taxes. The P&L said that I had a lot of income. I mean, I LOT. It struck me as far too much (seriously, I'm pretty sure I would remember having an extra $50,000 to spend), so I went poking through bank statements, and found that the numbers were way, way off. My accountant agreed with me that things were wonky, but she didn't know why either. As an aside, this was right after I put my mother in hospice, so as priorities go, tracking down some strange numbers was fairly low. We filed an extension and moved on with our lives. Between us, the accountant and I finally tracked down the source of the discrepancy in mid-August, and it turned out to be "QuickBooks hates statement charges and calculates them differently than invoices." I'd been using statement charges for two+ years, so the fix was to go back through and turn every single statement charge into an invoice instead.

You might think that sounds like rather a lot of boring, time-consuming work. It is. Also, this was August. Remember August? Go ahead, scroll back through my journal if you like. If you're too lazy to do that (I don't blame you), August went like this: John's grandmother dies (August 6, in Rogers City, 4 hours away from us.), my mother dies (August 16), my mother's funeral (August 24), John's grandmother's funeral (August 30, in Rogers City). Needless to say, I didn't get all the time-consuming work done in August. Nor did I get it done in early September, because we had some billing issues that lasted until just a few days before John and I left for a week. But the final, no-more-extensions deadline for filing 2007 taxes is October 15th, and my accountant made it clear that she needs the corrected statements before then. Preferably by last Friday, but I was out of town so she had to cope. I told her that I'd "make it a priority" for today, and I'd get it to her by today or tomorrow. Of course, when I told her that, I didn't realize that I was going to be spending part of the day trying to hold my mailserver together. (I did finally get it done, about an hour ago.)

Today is not so good.