Digital Choke Daynotes

 Sunday, September 26, 2004       mail    link

Hmm. Not much to read about last week. There were a few things that I could have mentioned, but I just couldn't find that "round-tuit".

So, for those of you that are interested, let's see if we can re-cap.

Monday was the atrial fibrillation day. So Tuesday I stayed home from work, although I did keep up with the email. Wednesday was back to work with the usual stuff.

Thursday was different. Stacy (back at college in Idaho) hadn't been feeling well all week, and Pam was concerned about the difficulty the doctors were having figuring out what was wrong. So her maternal instinct kicked in big time. She decided that she needed to go back there to help her get better. This was about 2pm, so we did some checking of flight schedules, and found a flight to Salt Lake City that left at 4:30. So she drove to the airport, but by the time she got there, the first leg of the flight was full.

A few phone calls got her a flight from Reno that left at 7pm. A quick trip home with a five-minute packing job, and we headed up I-80 to Reno. Mapquest says that it would take about an hour and 45 minutes to get there. We made it there by 6:30pm, carefully obeying all speed limits. So she was able to make the flight to SLC, getting there by about 11:30pm, then renting a car for the four hour drive up to Rexburg.

So, Pam got back there OK, did some quality 'mothering', and Stacy is feeling a bit better. Me, I've got the usual 'rumbly in my tumbly' over the past couple of days, and it's pretty quiet around here.

Spent Saturday working on the car. It seemed like the thermostat wasn't working right. On the trip back from the cabin last week, it was chilly outside, and the temp gauge was reading a bit low. So I figured the thermostat wasn't working right.

So, I got a new one, replaced it, got the engine up to temp, and then it was overheating a bit. So, pulled out the new thermostat, and did the boiling water tick, and it seemed to open up at the right temperature. And the old thermostat also passed that test. So, I put the old one back in, along with a fresh coolant mix, and now everything seems OK. Very mysterious. I was just glad I didn't decide to take it to the local repair shop, where they quoted about $125 to do the whole thing. It cost me about $20, and some skinned knuckles.

In the afternoon, I went over to my mother-in-law's house. Christine/Jared and the grandkids were there, and we had a nice dinner of BBQ chicken.

So now it's Sunday, and the usual Sunday schedule, except the visit from the children. Quiet around here. I did clean up all the dirty dishes in the kitchen, and took out the trash.

Stacy is getting better, so Pam is flying home tomorrow, getting in about 6pm. Perhaps things will get back to normal by then.

 Monday, September 27, 2004       mail    link

Pam made it back tonight; she's pretty tired.

My ISP seems to be having email server problems. Can't connect, and got a report of returned mail from the mail form we use here. Brian Bilbrey is the genteel host of these pages. He's also a "Daynoter"; you'll find his pages here -- it's on my 'daily visit' list. Brian used to live in Silicon Valley, but moved back to the Washington DC area last year. So Brian helps keep this place going, at a quite reasonable price. He's assisted by Greg Lincoln, who lives in the Florida area. Not sure exactly where, so don't know how he has fared with the weather there. But if you are looking for a good place for hosting that has reasonable prices and excellent service, check them out.

I spent all morning with the web filtering server at work. Had a problem with the category database, so blocking wasn't working quite right. A long call with the tech support guys (not outsourced, so good support) finally got everything working. Although it did require creating a new SQL database, which means that the blocking rules had to be recreated. The old rules were available and printable, and not too complex, so once things were running it didn't take long to get the rules rebuilt. At last check, all was well, and running a bit faster.

If you've sent any mail since this morning, it may not get delivered. But I don't get a whole lot of mail from here, so not a big deal. I suspect that all will be well tomorrow morning.

 Friday, October 1, 2004       mail    link

Let's see if we can get back on track.

I spent most of the day today at work on a problem with the Cold Fusion server. There are several form-based mail pages that are used to gather information from the public. The 'submit' page gathers the form information into a mail message, and uses the Cold Fusion mail command to send it off to our mail server. Those pages had been working quite well for a long time, then stopped.

Mail from that server goes to one of the two mail filter servers, then off to the internal mail system. Yesterday it looked like the mail filter server was blocking the messages. So I spent several hours trying to test and track mail messages in that server to see why they were getting blocked. There seemed to be some messages getting there, but not all of them. It took several hours to figure out that the mail filter server wasn't getting the messages.

So today I started digging into the Cold Fusion (CF) server. We have two CF servers (public-facing), and one was working just fine (although it had problems with some CGI-based mail forms). The CF mail forms were working just fine on that server.

The problem server could PING the mail filter server by IP address. And a TELNET command to the mail port (25) worked with the IP address of the mail filter server, but not by it's domain name. That sounded like a router or DNS problem, but that expert wasn't able to look at the problem until this afternoon.

In the meantime, I was able to figure out a way to get the backlog of messages delivered; about 400 of them. I was pretty proud of my technique. The messages that weren't sent were sitting in an undelivered folder, and they are just text files. So I moved them to my computer, renamed the file extensions to "cfm", then used DreamWeaver (Cold Fusion development platform; what I use her) to do a search/replace for the mail server domain name, changing it to the IP address of one of the mail filter servers. Then changed the file extension back to "cfmail", transferred them back to the CF server, then moved them into the mail queue folder. And off they went.

Some of them came back. We've been tightening up our mail filter server rules to reject mail relays, including messages without domain names in the 'from' field of the mail message. Those are usually spam, so we don't care about blocking them.

But some of the pages on the CF server used a 'from' address of something like 'mail response form'. No domain name there, so the connection to the mail filter server would be rejected, and the message would get stuck in the CF server's undeliverable folder.

So, a repeat of the process changed the 'from' address to include a domain name, and those messages were delivered.

All of that troubleshooting and testing took just about all of today. But I learned quite a bit about the mail delivery process of a CF server, and the customer was pleased that the problem was fixed.

And it turned out that the main cause of the problem was a typo in an IP address on the DNS server. Although there were some other issues that helped muddy the waters a bit.

So, it's late Friday night. I don't have any major plans for tomorrow. Pam has to work (end of fiscal year closeout, which takes until the middle of November). So I'm planning on a bit of cleaning around here. Didn't get much of that done last week, due to the work on the car thermostat.

Speaking of which, the original one seems to be working OK. My current theory is that new anti-freeze mix was the solution.

I did get an email from one of you guys (sorry, forgot who it was, and the message is gone). He mentioned that he had a similar problem with his thermostat, and it turned out to be a weak or bent hose that was interfering with the action of the thermostat. So he was wondering if that was the same problem.

A good thought, but on my 98 Camry, the thermostat is actually in a metal housing, so the flexible hose part is well out of the way of the thermostat action. And, in case you were wondering, I didn't put it in backwards. I thought of that, and took things apart again just to make sure. There were actually four installations/removal sequences. The first one to put in the new one. The second one to make sure I didn't put it in backwards. The third one to put the new one back in. And the fourth one to put the old one back in (correctly), after a boiling water test.

All is working now, though.

And the personal email account is working here at home. SureWest had some 'hardware problems' (they didn't get more specific than that) from late Monday through Wednesday morning. So if you sent something on those days, it may have not gotten through.

Although most of the usual spam did.

<sigh>