When I got up this evening I tried to access my e-mail and all the sudden my mail was gone.

      So I tried to check the size of my spool and the system told me I did not have permission.

      At this point it would not return to the command prompt nor would most of the servers I checked trying to identify the issue.

      After multiple reboots, I finally noticed ufw was missing the user rules on mail and that was the cause.  I suspect the rules disappeared because the machine ran itself out of disk space with debug data.

      It was an attempt to hack NIS into a Redhat based distro, but I think instead I am going to turn my attention towards implementing LDAP for user info distribution and Kerberos for authentication because they are both more secure and widely supported in modern operating systems and web applications.

So having exhausted 6.18.x I tried the pre-release of 6.19-rc3, the developers did not document the fact that it made substantial changes to the RAID super block, but it did. Since all of the storage on this machine is in the form of RAID arrays, this resulted in none of them being assemblable and the machine being unbootable. It said that I needed mdadm-1.45 or later, and 1.45 was the very most recent version.

I drove home, compiled 1.45, wrote to a USB thumb drive and a rescue file system on another USB, drove down, booted off the rescue, installed mdadm 1.45 but it also claimed the superblock was not usable. So much for it needing 1.45, NO version of mdadm worked.

I ended up rebuilding all the raid metadata keeping the file systems, this worked and everything is back up and we are back on 6.17.9 in spite of it not being completely stable it is less crippled than current 6.18 releases or

     I did not realize the time that this functionality in systemd did not work in Ubuntu 20.04.  We have this old server in place solely to server RoundCube mail because it is unmaintained software that will not function on newer installations.

     Since this facility did not work, mounts were lost after a reboot and did not automatically recover.  I have changed this one machine to use an older facility that serves a similar functionality but uses a dedicated daemon rather than systemd, autofs.

     I have tested it and it is now working and in place so RoundCube is again functional.

     This post also is a test of WordPress -> ActivityPub federation.

     I’ve installed a new shell server, anduinos.eskimo.com.  This is a debian derived server similar to popOS except the default graphical environment is Gnome configured to look like Windows.  Unfortunately this environment does not seem to work if using vnc or x2go, instead you just get default mate or gnome environments.

     I’ve installed a new application called ‘qman‘ on all the shell servers.  It is an alternative to man for reading manual pages.  Unlike man, it provides an index of sections and then pages within those sections and also provides colored highlighting that makes reading manual pages a bit more pleasant.