Late night thoughts

Thinking back on the day today it has been an extremely busy one. I had one of my friends in the hosting industry call me with an interesting problem on a Cobalt RAQ550 based machine.

The problem was that the SMTP server continually failed every night at about 1 or 2 in the morning. This was initially put down to it continually filling up the /var partition with log files. While this problem seemed easy to resolve - it wasn't.

After much diagnosis and painfull removal of hair follicles - It was finally discovered that on this machine a user email account called "httpd" was taking up a massive 140Meg of space with bounceback emails. It appeared to be that one of the sites hosted on this server had been configured without the proper settings for sending emails. This was located to be one of the 60 or 80 sites on that server.

The offending site was notified of the issue that they had been causing. It was a strange coincidence that they where the ones complaining when the system was failing. It was also strange that they didn't even know their website was supposed to be sending them emails on a regular basis - or the fact that they had probably missed out on possibly hundreds of potential clients due to a simple misconfiguration.

It all just shows that no matter who you are or how good you may think you are that anyone can make mistakes. These mistakes may not show up for years but when they do they can often be extremely costly!