I have to take the mail subsystem down for perhaps 45 minutes or so in order to fix an issue with grub that was broken by a Ubuntu update that left it in a half-secure boot and half non-secure boot state.  This could, if not fixed, cause a failure to reboot at a more critical time.  It’s best that I address this now while usage is low.

Wanted to update folks, the new CPU arrived, I installed it and the machine would not even post. Have not had time to troubleshoot further. However, I have another machine that I recently build that is essentially the same architecture, 10-core rather than 18-cores, but the 18 core machine was only running at less than 4% CPU occupancy so this should be fine. Over the next few days I’m going to move these services over to that machine since the existing machine seems to be determined to give me no end in grief.

The estimated time of return to service is around December 20th.  I am waiting upon the arrival of a new cpu.

     Ubuntu is currently down because it is in the process of being moved to new faster hardware.  It should be back up about 12:30AM Dec 11th.

The mail server is taking longer to copy than I anticipated.  This is because the RAID array is still synchronizing disk and so competing with the copy for disk I/O.

     The client mail server, mail.eskimo.com, is in the process of being moved from the Igloo server to the Ice server.  This is being done because the new Ice has 2-1/2 times as many CPU cores as the old machine and 4x the amount of RAM and mail needs more RAM to handle list serve deliveries better.

     During this time, login to shell servers will hang because they are waiting on the mail server spool mounted via NFS which isn’t responding because it is down while being moved.  i expect this to be completed around 3:30AM.