Computer went bang!

by Ian Posted on September 8, 2005

When I came down this morning, the computer I had just put the new hard disc in was beeping at me and had a burning smell. Somehow, I just knew this wasn’t right, so decided to just power it down and worry about the data later. So I pressed the power button.

What I wasn’t expecting was the flash of light and loud bang from the back of the computer, which tripped the downstairs circuit breaker. I guess the power supply had just had enough.

Just to make it worse, following the sudden power down, one of the hot swap discs on the server had failed and the server wouldn’t boot either. I didn’t have time to look at this before I went to work, so we had a computer free day, first for a long time.

Once I connected the server to a monitor this evening, it was a simple case of failing the faulty disc and the server recovered and remirrored the disc to the spare. Now to get a replacement power supply and hard disc and I will be back to where I was.

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Timeout problem with SquirrelMail client

by Ian Posted on August 28, 2005

I had a couple of problems with the SquirrelMail client that I installed. It kept logging the user out after a couple of minutes, very annoying if you are in the middle of typing an email. I checked all the suggestions for preventing this. One of the suggestions was to turn on the refresh of the folder list and set it to something like 10 minutes. This was already on and set to 1 minute, however changing the refresh to 2 minutes fixed my logout problem.

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More car problems

by Ian Posted on August 28, 2005

I found today that the luggage cover on my V70 has been broken. I haven’t need to use the boot since I had the MOT and brake fluid changed at the beginning of the month (link), so I hadn’t realised. The cover is like a roller blind that is attached to the car behind the rear seats. When I took it out of the car to see why it wouldn’t rewind, I found that the ends are broken inside. Looks like I will be ringing Pilling Volvo on Tuesday to complain. I won’t be taking my car back to the Milton Keynes dealership again, there have been too many issues.

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New home email server

by Ian Posted on August 27, 2005

I was looking at adding a webmail client to our existing home email server, Jana Server, but didn’t find anything that I could work with. Jana Server has been a good product, acting as a proxy server, when we were on dialup many years ago, and more recently as a POP/SMTP email server. However to provide good webmail functionality, we needed a IMAP mail server.

After looking around and trying a few products, I settled on SquirrelMail for the webmail client and hMailServer for the mail server. The hMailServer installation and configuration was straight forward, integrating into my existing MySQL database. The SquirrelMail installation seemed to be fine, but on log on kept repeating ‘Unknown user or password incorrect’ despite the correct credentials being entered. On further investigation, my PHP installation was missing 3 of the required extensions, gettext, ldap and imap. That will teach me to read the requirements first! I configured the php.ini file and could get gettext and ldap working, but could not get imap to load. After about 3 hours, I finally found the answer on Experts-Exchange . I had to create a copy of a Windows dll with a new name. Thanks Michael701.

Once I had sorted my PHP problems out the SquirrelMail installation was also very easy.

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