Archive for the ‘shit happens’ Category

Story time

Yesterday I received a mail from my ISP informing me that they had blocked my port 25 due to a spam problem. After checking my mail queue it appears to be filled with HUNDRED of delivery error emails failing to deliver to some remote mail server.

Yeah that’s not supposed to happen…

It took me the entire afternoon after troubleshooting every single part of the server (postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, postgrey,… ) to figure out what was actually going on.

I started believing that my mail server had gone rogue as the offending email would reappear on its own even after the mail queue got cleaned out.

I use fetchmail in a cron job to recover mails from some old addresses that I still occasionally use for confirmation emails that come from server that are unable to deal with postgrey.

As it turns out, one specific mail in that mailbox was being consistently rejected by postfix’s policies, generating a new error email every time and sending it back to fetchmail with a “couldn’t deliver” error message, which caused fetchmail to re-attempt delivery of that email every time.

Conclusion

Sure,  it allowed me to review my mail server configuration and to correct a few oddities but what a waste of time.

There hasn’t been a lot of updates lately, I know.

Last week I had to visit my family for a couple of days and after that my building had to be sprayed for insects and it wasn’t safe to stay in while they where doing it.

After that? Well autumn is coming rather abruptly so now I’ve caught a cold.

Fun times.

I should have a better update later today.

Someone kindly reported to me an issue with TB products losing their leash pulling ability on teleport. I spent a good chunk of monday figuring out what exactly was going on. As it turns out, this has been an issue since multi-chain was added, february of last year.

I’m surprised that no one else reported the issue before?

Anyway, there will be a lot of product updates in the next coming days as I deploy the patch, but it will take a little while to do all the affected items.

Despite contacting support I haven’t managed to obtain a reply as to why yet. To be clear, they haven’t just de-listed it, they deleted the product, which means that the reviews for it are gone too.

I’m going to wait for them to tell me what the problem is before trying to re-list it.

Considering that Linden Lab moderates the Marketplace solely through user reports, whoever you are, I hope you are proud of yourself.

In the meantime, it is still available from the in-world store if you want one.

There was a slight error when I finalized the HUD and some of you might have some weird color names and no “tan” leather preset.

Just IM me and I’ll send you a fixed preset file.

I Just came out of a fairly busy weekend (in Real life). Without going in details, I was mentally and physically exhausted when I collapsed in bed yesterday.

Today I haven’t done much. I picked up new hard disks from the post office to replace my failing ones and have been busy cloning the old ones and preparing a new backup strategy.

Because trusting an old worn out IDE drive to keep my most precious files is simply not going to cut it.

I swear I can finish the new boots this week!

Such a feeling of “déjà vu” there.

Our server released the “magic smoke” and completely refused to boot during the weekend. Entire machine lost, data unrecoverable. Thankfully I had a partial backup from the day before so not everything was lost.

Saying that, it’s a partial backup, which means that, while the essential systems are restored ( site/vendor system mainly ) there is still a lot of work to do and a lot of data was lost.

I have an update for it almost ready to go but I’m not home and on a quickly draining laptop battery, I will roll out a hotfix the second I’m back!

Pretty much everything else is done, HUDs, holders, and I even made a new sound for the spade crop, but getting the riding crop marks to look right is taking some time.

The past two weeks have been extremely stressful due to some RL issues that are taking a toll on my “sanity”, it’s sapping my energy and my drive and I struggle to remain somewhat productive.

Summary of the good stuff:

• The body doodle & impact engine for avatar 2.0 is pretty much code complete, that is, the prototype has all the required features implemented and it appears to work without any bugs. I will explain what it actually consists of at some point I swear…
• I’ve also started a “cleanup” on the documentation wiki, the translation function was a bit broken and I’m trying to make some of the illustrations clearer and to remove outdated instructions, filling up some of the missing pages too.