Heute Morgen musste ich leider feststellen, dass ich meine Mails nicht abrufen konnte, also kurz versucht den Server anzupingen und kein Feedback bekommen. Sogar der DNS-lookup ist fehlgeschlagen, später dann die Nachricht von Server4you, dass es nach unangekündigten Wartungsarbeiten zu einem Stromausfall kam und die Notfallversorgung versagt hat. Das bedauerliche Resultat war, dass den ganzen Tag über mein vServer nicht zu erreichen war :-(
Zum Glück ist er jetzt wieder online und ich hoffe mal, dass sie daraus gelernt haben und die Backups dann zukünftig auch richtig funktionieren. Aber schon ziemlich peinlich so ein Ausfall, dass darf eigentlich nicht passieren.

Update: Hier die Stellungnahmen vom Rechenzentrumbetreiber Avaya und Server4you.

This has nothing to do with the "Change" campaign by Barack Obama, but often "Change" is considered to be something good and sometimes "Change" is necessary.

Okay now the question arises what is he talking about and where does it lead us. In short I changed my blog-engine.

The not so short story is, I used Typo a Ruby on Rails based blog-engine. And since the ruby-interpreter and with it RoR applications as well are a little slowish. Additionally Typo was the sole application using Rails on the server and it would be a nice to get rid off Rails for a leaner server installation.
Now a decision has to be made, which blog software to choose? A precondition is a PHP-based blog software, because other installed software uses also PHP and the server configuration could remain unchanged and Perl is not really an acceptable option. One popular pick is WordPress but I do not like the politics around WordPress. Another quite popular software is Serendipity (s9y) with a lot of plugins and a active community. So I gave s9y a try.

The s9y installation was straight forward, but sadly the migration from Typo to s9y was not flawlessly and I had to do it manually. I migrated only the posts and no comments and trackbacks. One thing is broken now the old permalinks, but I do not really care about that.

So far everything works fine and I am pleased with s9y.

This is "Change (Part 1)" and yes there is even more change I will report of later.

I integrated dspam in dovecot, so it is now easy to train misclassified eMails. I adapted a dovecot plugin by Johannes Berg.

I changed line 157 from
execl (DSPAM, DSPAM, "--source=error", "--stdout", class_arg, sign_arg, NULL);
to
execl (DSPAM, DSPAM, "--source=error", "--stdout", "--user", "" class_arg, sign_arg, NULL);

This modification was necessary because I use virtual users for my mail environment. It is also necessary that dspam is configured to add the UID to the signature via MySQLUIDInSignature on or PgSQLUIDInSignature on so that it can automatically change to the right user.

This dovecot dspam integration makes dspamUpdate obsolete and I will discontinue development of dspamUpdate.

At the moment I am thinking wether it makes sense to change from a virtual dedicated server to a real dedicated server. My vServer is running Debian 3.1 and I like to have another OS. At least I want Fedora Core 5, CentOS 4.3 or Gentoo on the server. But I can only get FC3 for the vServer and I know that an update to Core 5 won’t work because there is only a 2.6.8 kernel on the vServer and I am not able to change the kernel.
On a dedicated server I can get FC5 and it is also possible to install Gentoo on it because it is easy to start a rescue system and change the system to Gentoo. For CentOS I do not know if it is that easy. But of course there are odds. The costs are more than the double of the vServer.
So what to do??? Any sugestions…