Domino, Email, Spam and IT Related

I have a computer at home, desktop computer, mostly for my kids to play computer game.

It’s not fancy, but more than enough to run gcompris or other small games, and my wife to surf the internet.

I don’t know what I did, but suddenly , the computer reach the warning temperature very fast. It only 15-30 minutes, the bios will give the warning, and in the next 10 minutes the computer will shutdown it self.

I set the warning temperature in 70 celsius, and shutdown temp in 80 celsius.

The motherboard is ECS A780GM-A with AMD X2 5000 processor.

My first guess is the processor fan.

So, I take it out, clean it up from the dust, clean up the old thermal paste and then apply a new one.

But still the temperature of the processor increasing quickly, even when still  in bios, I can see that the temperature increasing.

My second guess is my processor fan is damage, but it less than a year old?

But I replace it any way.

But the problem still exist.

Than, my fist guess is that the stock fan is not enough, so I buy a third party fan and installed it.

The problem still exist, but now the temperature increasing not very quickly. but still it become a problem.

I’m running out of options.

But when I browse the ECS website, I notice that they have a new bios.

So, nothing to lose (I already plan to buy a new one), I download the new bios and installed it over the old one.

The result, the temperature now is very stable.

Then I realize that I did the bios upgrade before, and that the cause of the temperature become unstable. Silly me .

Popularity: 1% [?]

Save to del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Submit to Netscape | Digg This!

Related Posts:

You need to buy a new server for your most critical data, the server should be able to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

What are to consider?

Brand of the servers? Of course. The softwares? Sure.

Anything else?

These are three things that cross my mind.

Raid 5

If your data are important, and mostly are, than use server that support Raid, at least Raid 5.

With Raid 5, we use at least three hard disks with the same capacity (and better with the same brand and model) and configure it as one drive. If one hard disk failed, the data still can be accessible.

Without Raid 5, if you have three hard disk, and one hard disk is failed, that all the data in  that hard disk will be lost.  You need to rely on your latest backup and pray that restoring the data won’t be a problem.

Minor side with Raid 5 is that Raid 5 will use one hard disk capacity as it parity, so if you have three 1 TB  hard disks, than the total of your capacity is only 2 TB.

And also with Raid 5 , the performance is slower.

With at least Raid 5, you will have redundancy and more capacity compare to Raid 1. There is also Raid 6 that extend the Raid 5.

More about Standard Raid Levels

Hot Swap

Ok, now you use Raid 5 for your critical servers that should run 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

If one hard disk failed, at least your server still able to run with slower performance.

Now, you still need to replace the failed hard disk with a new one. If your server support Hot Swap capabilities like most IBM xseries, than it should not be a problem. You just need to unplug the failed hard disk, wait for 30 seconds and plug in the new one. Total time should be less than one minute.

But, what if your server do not support Hot Swap?

You need to shutdown your server (when? ), open the server case if necessary, detach the cables, unplug the failed hard disk, then plug in the new disk, attach the cables, close the case then power it on again.

How much time do  you need for that?

And you need a spare time to do it, you can’t just shutdown the server on office hours, you need to do it after office hours, or maybe before office hours or maybe on weekend?

Warranty

Make sure that your servers have good support and spare parts availability.

One thing that I like the most from IBM server is their warranty and support.

While I’m working with the IBM servers, I have two mainboards problem and four failed hard disks.

The longest time it need is to replace one mainboard from the old server (very old), because they need to ship it from Singapore.

Recently I have one failed hard disk (one of the reason why I wrote this), call IBM support and describe the problem, and all they need is our machine type, serial number and the FRU of the hard disk. Then hard disk replacement already in the office in the next morning.

That what I called a good support.

If they need a month to replace a failed a broken part, that the support, the warranty is useless.

If your warranty going to expired, or already expired, you should, you must extend it. It’s not cheap, but for me, very worthed.

With IBM, you can choose 5 days support, or 7 days support. With 7 days support, if you call them on weekend, they still come.

Not sure for other brand, if they support as good as IBM. I only works with IBM brand.

Note, I’m not an employee of IBM.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Save to del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Submit to Netscape | Digg This!

Related Posts:

I used to backup my Lotus Domino server R8.02 with CA Brighstor Arcserve backup R11.1 with Lotus Domino agent, without any problems. CA Brighstor Arcserve backup for my opinion may be the best backup software that support Lotus Domino available.

But recently, I have problem with my domino server, it crashed with error message that the transaction log is full.

I do full backup every week, and incremental backup daily, it should be enough. I check the web for what might cause the problem, and all point to the transaction log problem.

Restarting the domino server, fixed the problem, until than it crashed again, with the same error.  But now, I’m really curious, is there something wrong with my transaction log?

I found the problem accidentally, when I tried to backup individual mail file, I can’t found many mail files from Brighstor Arcserve backup user interface.

Than I realize that all the mail files that Brighstor Arcserve backup can’t found are under the directory link.

Recently, I added a new harddisk into the server, and make it as a additional drive (drive E). Than I moved several mail databases to that drive, and than created a directory link so Lotus Domino can see the mail databases.

Yes, the Lotus Domino can see the databases, but not Brighstor Arcserve backup. That maybe the problem.

I can’t found anything in the web, so join the CA forum and ask the question, the answer is that I should pacthed the software.

But, than I upgraded to Brighstor Arcserve backup R11.5 instead.

Now, with Brighstor Arcserve backup R11.5, it can see all the databases that are under directory link, I hope that it can solved the problem and no more crashed.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Save to del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Submit to Netscape | Digg This!

Related Posts:

Recently, I have these lines in my daily log, many of them.

Jun  8 10:56:24 mail dccproc[13204]: continue not asking DCC 78 seconds after 5

Jun  8 10:56:27 mail dccproc[13207]: continue not asking DCC 75 seconds after 5

Jun  8 10:56:37 mail dccproc[13228]: continue not asking DCC 65 seconds after 5

Jun  8 10:56:44 mail dccproc[13247]: continue not asking DCC 58 seconds after 5

Jun  8 10:56:49 mail dccproc[13251]: continue not asking DCC 53 seconds after 5

Jun  8 10:56:49 mail dccproc[13252]: continue not asking DCC 53 seconds after 5

Jun  8 10:56:58 mail dccproc[13272]: continue not asking DCC 44 seconds after 5

Jun  8 10:57:05 mail dccproc[13288]: continue not asking DCC 37 seconds after 5

So, there is something wrong with my dcc process.
After several google, there is only two options.
-Problem with firewall/connection
-Problem with configuration

I know, this is not a problem with firewall/connection, because I did not changed anything and the server have direct connection to the internet.

So, there must be some configuration problems.

I run cdcc info from the console, and notice there problem with the map file.
Do some google again, and find this and this.
And I do exactly what it say.

cdcc -q info map.txt
cdcc “load map.txt”

That’s it, and DCC runs again.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Save to del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Submit to Netscape | Digg This!

Related Posts:

If you using spamassassin to reduce spam to your mail server, there is big possibilities that you are also using DCC (Distributed Checksum Clearinghouses).

If you are not (yet) use DCC in your spamassassin, than you should consider to install one.

DCC is a free software, as long as you don’t sell the device or the service to to others. Reade the DCC license here.

Installation DCC may be confusing for some people (including me ), but when it installed and configured properly, it will catch more spam that you already catch.

The good point is, if the DCC already installed, than is easy to update it.  You just need to download  the updatedcc script here, and copied it to /usr/local/bin (might be different with your OS ) with the rest of DCC files.

How to update? Just run the updatedcc and the process will run automatically.

After all the process completed, do a simple check to see if your DCC already updated.

dccproc -V

It will show the version of your DCC software.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Save to del.icio.us | Stumble It! | Submit to Netscape | Digg This!

Related Posts: