An Intro to Mail Servers and How E-mail Works

8 February 2015 | Computers, How Does it Work?, Networking | 1 comment

E-mail rocks?Everybody uses e-mail. It’s great.

Not everybody understands exactly how e-mail works, and even fewer people have ever tried to set up a mail server. For those of you who have, I can pretty much guarantee you that you’re doing something wrong.

Even if you aren’t setting up your own mail server, you really should understand the limitations of e-mail, especially in terms of security.

So, in this post I’ll try to give a simple and quick intro to e-mail and mail servers

If you are an admin looking for a postfix or exim “quick answer” that you can copy and paste, you must read this more than anyone!

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Severe GRUB Problem in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

4 May 2011 | Computers | 8 comments

If you’re using Ubuntu Server 10.10 and you get the upgrade notice for 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, you might want to hold off a bit before taking the plunge and typing “do-release-upgrade”.

It seems there is a rather severe problem with GRUB 2. If you have a RAID setup – and even if you don’t – GRUB may not load at all upon reboot, leaving you with a bricked server.

There doesn’t seem to be a fix for it. In fact, I do believe the name of the release should be changed to “Nasty Narwhal”.

Here’s the scoop.

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