Infopackets mail server crash

For reasons still unknown, the infopackets dedicated mail server suffered a catastrophic crash during a routine newsletter delivery (1.5 weeks ago) and was unable to boot back into the operating system. Unfortunately, the server's operating system reached 'end of life' about 2 months after it was put into service, and so it is quite plausible that the server was compromised due to an operating system exploit.

The company which hosts the mail server for infopackets.com informed me that I would need to re-image (reformat) the mail server in order to bring it back to life. Since the original mail server operating system was no longer supported (Linux Red Hat 9), it was in my best interest to upgrade to the latest RedHat release, called Redhat Enterprise.

Because the mail delivery program used to deliver the newsletter is very CPU intensive -- and for the reason that I wasn't quite sure what caused the crash in the first place (it could have been faulty hardware) -- I elected to cancel the existing mail server and order a new, faster web system coupled with the latest Redhat release.

Side note: CPU stands for 'Central Processing Unit'. In layman's terms, the CPU is the brain of a computer and is responsible for processing information. CPU Time is 'the amount of time a CPU is actually executing instructions. During the execution of most programs, the CPU sits idle much of the time while the computer fetches data from the keyboard or disk, or sends data to an output device. The CPU time of an executing program, therefore, is generally much less than the total execution time of the program. Multitasking operating systems take advantage of this by sharing the CPU among several programs.' (Source: webopedia.com)

RE: Changes Complete (sort of)

After a week and a half of programming changes to the new mail server, I am pleased to announce that everything appears to be fully functional. Unfortunately I have fallen behind in my schedule to make changes to the infopackets web site layout. I will resume implementing these changes next week (hopefully we'll see major changes to the web site by the end of the summer). Keep your fingers crossed!