Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Last night my friend Mike and I decided it was time to upgrade the Xserve that hosts this site from 10.4.10 to 10.5.0. We traveled downtown to the co-lo facility, and immediately discovered that we had been locked out. The card reader at the door did not respond to our swipes. We called someone from Time Warner to let us into the room, and he informed us that the card reader system had just been upgraded, so there may be some kinks.

We installed the Leopard upgrade, and when the server rebooted, it told us the serial number provided with the software was invalid. A trip to the Apple support discussion forums provided the answer. It’s a known bug. We entered the new serial number with Server Admin on another Mac, then rebooted the Xserve, and then re-entered the serial number again during the setup. Not a giant deal, but a tad annoying.

The server started and all of our settings had been migrated perfectly. All services were running that should be running. All OD users and their properties had been preserved. We tested to make sure web pages were being served. Everything seemed to be functioning properly, so we left, knowing that once the door closed behind us, we couldn’t get back in because TW had screwed up the card reader.

When we got back to Mike’s house, we discovered that nothing worked anymore, and we had no way to get back into the room because it was late and we doubted anyone from TW was going to be happy about helping us. Plus, our sites and personal e-mail hosted ont he Xserve aren’t that critical, so we left it down overnight.

This morning, the lady at TW informs us that she forgot to migrate our accounts from the old card server to the new one, and she apologizes and tells us it should be corrected within a few hours. Three hours later, Mike is able to get into the co-lo room.

The Xserve has kernel panicked. Somehow or another, both NICs had been assigned the same IP address (which wasn’t the case when the machine had been running Tiger) and that was enough to make the machine panic after a short but random amount of time. (I suspect there’s something more to it, but we wanted the server up ASAP so we didn’t go too deep.) Mike removed one NIC, assigned the correct IP to the internal NIC, and all was well again.

Until we noticed e-mail wasn’t being delivered. It turns out there’s a bug in Leopard server 10.5.0 where mail doesn’t get delivered to mailboxes defined by aliases in Workgroup Manager. And wouldn’t you know it, all the mailboxes on our server are WGM aliases. Luckily, this PDF at topicdesk.com explains how to implement Postfix aliases as a workaround until Apple fixes the problem. The error in the SMTP logs, by the way, for those of you who are curious, and for Google, was:

550-Mailbox unknown. Either there is no mailbox associated with this 550-name or you do not have authorization to see it.

So, after a TW screw-up and three Apple bugs, an upgrade and associated troubleshooting we should have had completed by the time we finished our pizza last night turned into roughly 24 hours downtime. I have truly wasted my life.