Flashes of Panic

Every so often, I wind up spending a significant part of my day fighting fires. This morning, we started with the infected home machine. (And, of course, GriSoft's website isn't responding, so it's taking a long time to download AVG.) Then we had the editor who mistakenly saved a file over another, and wants to figure out how to recover the original one. I could almost see the tears in her eyes while I explained that, no, when you overwrite the file, it's gone, like running your credit card over a big-ass magnet.

Now the mail server is running dog-slow, and everyone's complaining that they can't send email. (I need more detail than, "It won't go," sorry.) OK, here, I'll take the opportunity to install a few patches on the server, and reboot the damn thing.

The upside is, everyone expects me to make this work, because they have this vision of me as The Miracle Worker. The downside is, well, everyone expects me to make this work. &$^#. System's back up, and now I can't get mail or send it.

[Update: It's qpopper, at some level. I think. SMTP appears to be working, but you can't POP or read through IMAP. inetd appears to be working, but neither qpopper nor imapd will come up, so users get "connection refused."]

[Update 2: POP appears to be working. It's just IMAP. And, of course, I'm the only IMAP user in the company. Damn and blast.]

[Update 3: Then they were all working, but really, really slowly. For no apparent reason, because the load on the box was minimal. Now, equally inexplicably, it's all back. Apparently I "fixed it," but since I don't know what was wrong, nor what solved the problem, if it happens again I'm equally as clueless. I blame the spammers. I always blame the spammers.]