Just About Finished

I think that will about do it.

Repartitioning and reinstalling a production mail server is never a fun process, and it is seldom smooth. Today, I turned my old OpenBSD 3.4 box into an OpenBSD 3.8-beta system, and a bunch of things went wrong, but nothing I could not repair. I found some bugs in my qinst script that I've never run across before. Isn't that always the way? I patched it to finish the install, but I know better for next time.

There was copious use of the pkg_add utility: OpenBSD is one of the many flavors of UNIX that offers quick installation of pre-compiled third-party binaries. Since this box is an obsolete Pentium 133MHz, compiling anything is downright painful. I first tried to compile Binc directly, but after thirty minutes it had compiled exactly two source files, so I opted instead to install 3.8-beta on a newer, faster Celeron box, compile it there, and rsync the finished result back to the Pentium. I've pulled this trick before and it tends to work rather well.

I knew I'd forget something — I always do — fortunately, it was only my crontab, and I don't recall anything terribly irreplaceable being in it. There is more to do still, but everything that's terribly important is back up and appears to be working.