What a crappy week/month

woosh, what a crappy month. My internal mail server crashed about a month ago (yes I have 2 mail servers). The internal one actually holds all my mail (about 8 years worth of mail). The cyrus database pointing to all the mailboxes went corrupt.

I decided it went corrupt because I was running Gentoo’s unstable installation (also known as ~x86) and compiling installing too many experimental kernels (the mm-sources). So first I rebuilt the entire OS using the gentoo-dev-sources (I still wanted a 2.6 kernel for firewire & XFS support) and the stable (x86) packages. That was last weekend. I spend about 10 hours on that.

Then yesterday I spent another 10 hours bring mail back online and getting my mailboxes back. Fortunately the actuall mailboxes were still OK, just the mailboxes.db file had become corrupt. Cyrus’ reconstruct option wasn’t working. So I created a new one by creating a new mailbox with the same name.

Once I had done this I ran the reconstruct command to recover the mailbox — budda-bang, almost all my mail was back. Only one folder and it’s sub-folders was missing.

So I went into my mail program, created a folder with the exact same name, flipped back to the server and ran reconstruct again. That did it, now I had all my mail back.

A quick re-implementation of fetchmail and a restoration of my sieve rules and I’m back in action on the e-mail front.

Of course that is all fairly minor, but during all this I also had a root canal (which still freaking hurts and drained my bank account until my insurance reimbursement kicks in) and my car’s check engine light came on (because i ran it out of gas — not immediately fatal in a hybrid car but not exactly a good idea either) and it needs to be serviced for a whole day on a recall notice. And my tooth still needs a crown.

But then on the plus side, I don’t live in Florida or Alabama so I haven’t lost my house to a hurricane and the dentist gave me lots of pain killers for the tooth.