This week, I spent a long time mucking about in the mail relays. Freshclam skipped over 8 of the 9 mirrors it knew about, and the remaining one was down, so it spun for an hour trying to fetch new virus definitions. While it was busy with that, clamd woke up, tried to refresh the database, couldn’t acquire the lock (since freshclam had it), and shut itself down. That broke the two clamdscan processes that amavisd-new was using, and 6000 messages piled up in the Postfix incoming queue. I managed to get the whole mess resolved with the help of debian-volatile, which provides rolling stable packages for ClamAV and other frequently-changing projects. I also put in place more comprehensive monitoring for Cacti and Nagios, so next time the queues explode, we’ll know about it sooner.

For the last few days, I’ve been drawing little sketches on my whiteboard, regarding the various goings-on at work. My boss Laird suggested that I put them online, so here they are!

On Tuesday, I was fixing the file transfer box; an apt upgrade had updated some libraries that SFTP relied on, which meant rebuilding the chroot environment with the help of ldd.