2 Steps Backwards, 3 Steps Forward (Hopefully)

Sometimes in golf, IT, and life, you have to hit out sideways or take a walk back to get a better idea of how to go from that point.  Recently an aging server for one of my clients crashed.  Dead motherboard, no replacement readily available.

It was a blessing in disguise, as the server needed a refresh, but at 8PM on Friday, with a bunch of processing to be done on the weekend, it wasn’t the time to get fancy.  The OS was mirrored on a PCI raid card, and the other 2 drives were just plain old SATA, the drives were housed in a cage and finding a machine to accommodate that enclosure was the challenge.  By taking the cd out of an older ThinkCentre I had a place to pass the cables and was able to boot!  #WOOT!

Aside from some of the security settings on the shares needing to be reset, all appeared well, until the mail attachments stopped coming…

It seemed that any attachments much larger than 1MB were getting stuck trying to be delivered from the mail scrubbing service.  The messages were listed as “In deferral” because their communication with the server was interrupted.

Ok, well first thing I knew was the server was in my office which meant a lot more copper wire between it and the gateway.  So moving the franken-box server was attempt 1.  #fail.

Ok, well maybe the NIC was the issue, cheap easy fix.  #fail x 2

Ok, we were in the process of being transitioned by our mail scrubber to a new system.  Perhaps the old system had been deprecated.  Time to finalize the move.  My test email at 3 AM seemed to go through, looks like success.  NOPE… no one else’s seemed to come through.  #failfailfail

Ok, time to start going backward.  Luckily the easiest thing to change was the network connection.  There was no way to go back to the original NIC as it was on the failed MoBo.  But the other big change was the switch.  So I grabbed the old network cable and swapped it with the new CAT6 cable I had upgraded it to.  Bingo.  Flood of attachments coming in.  #ITWin.

It will take some down time once everything settles to identify exactly the issue, but my money is on the fancy Gigabit switch that all the new boxes use.  It should have throttled back on the bandwidth and the MTU, but my guess is there was some sort of incompatibility.  Or it was just homesick for its old switch, computers have feelings too.