unixwiz anything dealing with *NIX or what ever I want to write about

Spam fighting problems

I spent last night updating the software on the Spam scanners. Only had one little problem. On the final machine (which happens to be 1 of 2 machines that handle all the outgoing mail for the campus), the primary harddrive died. But since I had the disks mirrored with SVM (Solaris Volume Manager), I thought this should not be a problem, just boot off of the mirror and wait till monday to get the disk replaced. Wrong, I spend 2+ hours trying to get it to boot. First problem was that the boot block was not on the second drive, no big problem, boot off of the network and install it. Well the machine (SunFire V480R) would refuse to boot off of the Jumpstart server. Everytime it would come up saying it couldn't open kernel/unix.. No matter what I put in there it would not work. I tried both Solaris 9 (04/04) and Solaris 9 (09/05) and neither would work.. I had this same problem a while back with a E420R system, so I tried doing the set-defaults, which did not work. I finally ended up booting it off of the Solaris 10 01/06 image and it booted. So I cleared the SVM configs so that it would not grip about the metadb's missing, and I also installed the solaris 9 boot block. Shut it down and back up and it started right up off of the mirror. I looked all over the Internet last night for a cause of the "kernel/unix not found" but the only thing I found was some stuff from way back in 2000 that Casper Dik wrote. The first hits that came up on docs.sun.com were for Solaris 2.5.. So does any one out there have a clue why it did that, and another oddity is that there was nothing in the log files saying that the disk was bad before I rebooted it. probe-scsi only reported 1 drive, and as soon as I booted Solaris 9, the system then reported that the disk had died and that it had turned the fault light on.

An update to the numbers I posted last night, for 1 full day the new machine handled.  344,225 messages of which 293,886 where discarded, leaving it at 85% of the mail was spam. After quarantine of some "questionable" messages, only 46,408 where actually delivered , or about 13% of  "good" messages.