Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

ClearOS and SMTP with Comcast

With ClearOS 6 I was never able to get outgoing mail to work decently. Sure I could have used Comcast as a relay but then all my mail shows a bunch of Comcast junk as the sender. Pass. For some reason I don’t remember I could not get it to work well with Google;s servers either.

Well now I am running ClearOS 7, and the email seems to work flawlessly out of the box. I simply entered my Google mail settings (worked just fine with a Google Apps Domain) and hit the “Update and test” button – BAM! Email delivered. I am so happy right now.

There was one small catch, not any Gmail config worked. Here is what I used: Port 465 with SSL, 587 with TLS wouldn’t work for me. This was for ClearOS using Google SMTP servers with Comcast as the ISP.

OS X and transferring files (with Transmit)

In my last post I mentioned how one of my server hard drives died and I ended up purchasing a replacement. I had done some thinking on what I wanted to do with regards on how to utilize the new drive, and that ClearOS 7 was now available. I decided to use the new 3TB drive as added storage, and migrate some files. I wanted to merge my Plex media to one source instead of being spread over three drives like it was. To do this was very easy, just time consuming due to the amount of movies I needed to move, somewhere around 450GB worth. I didn’t even think of using the terminal and issuing a “mv” command as I am sure it would have been faster and this issue wouldn’t have occurred. I fired up Transmit FTP and opened two windows. One window was the old drive and the other the new. I simply drag and dropped the files, copying them, and let it run while I went to sleep. I awoke the next day to an error of no free disk space on my Mac Pro. WTF? Upon investigation I found that Transmit was caching the file transfers locally on my Mac. Thats just fucking stupid. So I’m assuming that you cannot transfer more files than you have free disk space, because apparently it will run your drive down and crash your shit.

A reboot will clear the cache (for Transmit) or you can manually delete the cache. Its located at:
~/Library/Cache

There is a ton of other crap in there as well. Most of it should be safe to delete, it is just cache right?

Hard drive failure and adventures in ClearOS 7

I woke up Friday morning to the wife, “hey wake, the computer in the closet is making noises” (I have the server in the family room front entry closet with the door open). Oh great, fantastic way to wake up. Sure as shit it was making noises, zzzzzzzz-click zzzzzzz-click. Thing is toast. Good news or bad news first? Good? It was only a 160GB SATA 3GB/s drive nothing massive, and it was not the OS so the intarwebs and therefor our lives are all still functioning. The bad… it was a storage drive, a rather old storage drive – that was not backed up as it was rarely used. It contained all of our digital family pictures for the last 15 years. From the birth of our first daughter to the camping trip we had this last July. Gone. I never did like digital pictures.

In the wake of the disaster I ran out to Fry’s and purchased a replacement drive. Wow, drives are cheap now. I haven’t bought a hard drive in ages it seems. I was able to snag a 3TB 7200RPM SATA 6GB/s for $99 (without shopping around). 1TB drives as cheap as $40 bucks, damn! Even the 2TB hybrid-SSD drive was only $100 dollars.

Here is where the fun really begins. Since I had a shiny new, and massive, drive should I just do a fresh install and migrate to the new drive? Should I just toss it in as storage and rock on. Or, should I do a fresh install of ClearOS 7 that just recently dropped? I opted for a clean ClearOS 7 install. Sadly I feel it still hasn’t come very far from when I tried it back in Beta. It installed flawlessly this time and in a fairly decent amount of time. No issues with the quad-gigabit PCI-e network adapter which was nice. The thing that I noticed overall that worked out of the box with zero issues was the server sending email. My ISP blocks port 25 and I found ClearOS 6 to be a pain in the ass to get it to send mail, in fact I was unsuccessful in my attempts (I do not want to use my ISP as a relay). With 7 I was able to change the settings very easily to use GMail servers with no problems. However but it was not by any means a smooth configuration process. In fact I write this from my ClearOS 6.6 network, I booted back into the old drive (I didn’t wipe it!). I had nothing but problems trying to get Flexshares to work over the network, mainly because Samba was being a bitch. OpenLDAP and Samba were not playing nice. I am gathering from all the research and tweaking conf files that I installed some modules in an “incorrect” order. I found a post somewhere that mentioned the SMTP module was required to get Flexshares working 100%. WTF?

Anyways after some thinking I decided what I was going to do. I am currently transferring all my Plex media to the new 3TB drive where it will live. I am going to use one of the 80GBs as a torrent scratch disk (to prevent future catastrophes), and the other 80GB or 160GB as the new ClearOS 7 drive. Then I’ll migrate whats left to the 3TB for storage and wipe the other drives. Seven in all, about 5TB of space. I am thinking of playing with ClearOS 7 as a virtual box to get it right before getting dirty. I have one year before 6 goes EOL for support/updates. No problem.