Oh yes – forgot to mention – off to Vietnam for two/three weeks. Back in early March.

P.S. Yes I know this post only showed up after we left. Damn EE.

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Just watched The Colbert Report as Stephen Colbert lambasted John Howard for his comments on Barack Obama. So very, very funny. Apparently we Australians have balls the size of kookaburras but we should mind our own business and next time we’re waltzing matilda we should check out Matilda’s adam’s apple because dude she’s a MAN!

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I mentioned in a previous post that I had purchased a VPS to use as a backup MX and a data store for some bits and pieces. The backup has proven so effective that I cancelled my MailHop Outbound and MailHop Backup MX services. Everything worked out of the box (as it were), installed, configured, compiled correctly – I had forgotten how remarkably easy it was to configure Postfix as a backup MX. I have refrained from putting too much spam filtering onto the backup – leaving that on my more powerful and considerably faster primary MX. I might revisit that later but at the moment some basic recipient filtering seems to be catching a lot of the spam that has arrives via that MX (which being in the US and the primary is in Australia seems to respond slightly faster to some MTAs irrelevant of the priority – another thing to look at).

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One of my great worries is backups and redundency. I have a lot of shit on my servers that I really would be upset about losing – probably the most important thing is about a 1Gb worth of mail archives. I had a pretty nasty HDD drive crash late last year (and two other minor ones when migrating some data) that I just managed to recover from.

So I have gone into overkill backup mode – backing up to a re-writeable DVD, backing up my mail to a zip file onto another server, using offlineimap to back up my Maildir to the Powerbook. Now I’ve added a xen server provided by the excellent guys/gals at VPSland. I have configured it as a backup MX, added some offlineimap goodness and will look at using it for some DNS resolution as well. I bought the cheapest package – 128Mb of RAM – and had Fedora Core 6 installed on it. It’s proving well worth the dollars.

With a bit of luck I can cancel my MailHop services and use this instead. Much easier to manage and more cost effective.