RainDrop Laboratories Status

My hosting facility is upgrading their power system to add some monitoring
capability. Unfortunately, this means that all the systems will have
to be unplugged, sometime around 7-8pm tonight. It should only be for
a few minutes, but with agora’s flaky disk, it could take a half an hour,
if the disk doesn’t fail entirely (I think that’s actually unlikely,
but…).

Sorry about the short notice — next weekend was an option, but I didn’t
want to have the possibility of major problems that might not be fixable
before I leave for England. This gives more time to resolve anything that
might turn up…

I’m in the process of configuring “freeradius” to do dialup authentication. It’s nearly ready, there’s just a little more tweaking of the dedicated connection authentication. Unfortunately, it’ll probably be Sunday before I can work on it again, but this should all be transparent — you won’t even notice when I switch this out.
The next phase after radius is moved is mail, which I’ll resume work on Sunday as well. The software is installed and running, so hopefully it’s just a matter of tweaking a bit, and then doing the virtual domain configuring. Once that’s done, then I need to document mail client configuration, then I can have users do some initial testing, prior to repointing the domain.

So, in brief, the next few steps:

• configure and test freeradius
• reconfigure terminal server to authenticate against new system
• test courier imap/pop server
• configure virtual domains in postfix
• copy over mailman files from old system
• test mail list operation
• document mail client configuration with new system
• have users test new mail server
• repoint rdrop and virtual domain mail to new server

Phew!

OK, here’s where we’re at:

These are the key services that are needed to get agora moved to the new system:

• radius
• This is the service that authenticates dialup users
• For various reasons, I need to change the type of software used for this, which means porting some custom scripting needed for the two dedicated connections still remaining
• dns
• Need to move all the domains hosted on agora over to “aggie” (temporary name of the new system)
• web
• Need to move all the web sites currently hosted on agora over
1. create new names (”www2″) for each site, pointed at the new server
2. content is already being mirrored on the new server
3. have users verify that sites work on new server
4. repoint primary name (”www”) to new server
• mail
• outgoing mail currently operational with postfix
• incoming mail filtered with amavisd/clamav/spamassassin
• need to configure hosted domains so mail for them is accepted and routed properly
• courier imap/pop server installed, need to verify config and operation
• shell mail clients (mutt, pine) need to be verified with the new server (specifically that they’re setup to use imap by default)
• mailman
• The mail lists that are hosted on agora need to be copied over and operation verified
• forwarding aliases need to be setup until the domain is repointed
• documentation
• Need to update documentation for configuring outlook express and thunderbird on Win2K/XP and Mac OSX for use with the new server
• Need to document process for obtaining digital certificate and encourage users to do so (not critical for migration)

That’s all! ;-)