Category: Rant

Another reason why Exchange is not my favourite mail server

I belong to a YahooGroups mailing list for a club I joined. This morning, in quick succession, I got a message, then I got a message saying it was a correction to the previous message, and then I got 13 (so far) messages with the phrase “Message Recall Failure” followed by the subject of the first message, sometimes with some spam or anti-virus catcher stuff inserted.

A google suggests that the person who sent the first message decided to use an Exchange feature that allows you to “recall” or cancel a message you sent. Evidently the recipients who use Exchange servers got these “recall” requests, but didn’t like them for some reason, probably because the original had come through the yahoogroups server rather than the originator’s server. And Exchange had expressed its disapproval of the recall message by sending a message back to the yahoogroups list address, which went out to everybody on the list.

I’m just hoping those 13 messages are it, and we don’t get any more.

Not a good idea

This morning I was investigating a problem at a customer site where their Manager (a program I wrote most of) is hanging. Thanks to “kill -3 pid” I discovered it was building a tool tip. Thanks to a database query, I found that the tool tip it was building was trying to display 430,000+ identical date ranges. Hmmm, looks like we’re going to be a while, and probably a little short of screen real estate at the same time.

I did a few database commands to remove the 430,000+ records and put back one copy of it. (I’m sure somebody has a command that will do both in one step – I did a “delete” followed by an “insert” because I’m lame.)

The Field Engineer at the customer site wrote to ask if I could tell him the database commands in case this happens again. I politely declined. I told my boss that this would be somewhat like giving handguns and tequila to a bunch of 9 year old boys. Repeat after me:

I’m sorry, you appear to have totally hosed the database. You’re going to have to wipe the database and re-injest all your content. You’ll probably be up and running again in two days or so.

Spoke too soon

Yesterday I wrote that I’d turned off the old machine for the last time. Well, it turns out I was wrong. I had put the mp3s in the wrong location, and had the permissions wrong, and so the backup script’s rsync deleted the mp3s from the wrong place and then couldn’t write them to the correct place. Which meant that this evening I had to turn the old machine back on, copy the mp3s back over (only having to reboot the old machine twice as it froze up under heavy load as it is prone to do) and then shut down the old box once again. Now that that’s done, I have to re-import my iTunes library, which will undoubtedly continue long after I’ve gone to bed tonight.

On the plus side, though, I managed to get the UPS software NUT installed and working. My new box doesn’t have a serial port, which means I had to use the USB driver for the first time. The kernel first identifies the UPS as a X Box controller (xpad), but eventually the newhidups driver figured it out.