My new mailserver experienced hardware problems related to harddisks and/or motherboard. The problem first occured in /var/log/messages as command timed out on the ata disk.
Then later, Ext3 was experiencing aborted journal, which then make the filesystem read-only. This promptly caused problem with the mailserver activity since people couldn’t send/receive mails anymore.
At first, rebooting the machine would temporarily solve the problem, but it became more often everyday and worsened, I couldn’t even log into the machine anymore.
So, we decided to move back the mailserver to the old machine temporarily. We need to backup this:
- The vpopmail database in mysql.
- /var/qmail/
- /home/vpopmail/
- /var/log/qmail/
- /var/log/maildrop/
- /etc/mail/
- /.spamassassin/
- /etc/tcprules.d/
- /usr/share/toaster/mrtg/
- /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, along with any htaccess password file.
The cause of the problem is still unknown, but I suspect these:
- Electrical surge from an old UPS used by the mailserver.
- The temperature of the server room is too cold. 18 degree celcius? I need to check the operational temperature for the harddisk.