Questions[journalling](server)

My Ubuntu backup server was recently upgraded in storage space to a RAID 10 array... now it consists of 8T of raw drive space which was before 2T of space.

But I have been having trouble when it actually goes into production and starts backing up my main file server. It would always go into a degraded state when the rotation took place.

I noted that some of my scripts copy pretty big trees with cp -a... since i've replaced all cp commands with rsync... for a little more reliability :)

However, digging upon the subject of ext4 I discovered that journal entries are left unsatisfied too long (so it appears) so I've moved back to ext3.

I am considering creating a RAID 1 partition by using a small partition on drive and a ramdisk as the actual journal which should ensure speed for journal response and also ensure that the data is not lost upon reboot.

What are your thoughts?

For a production sharded MongoDB installation we need 3 configuration servers. According to the documentation "the config server mongod process is fairly lightweight and can be ran on machines performing other work". However, in the default configuration, they all have journalling enabled, and with preallocation this takes up 3 GB of disk space. I assume that the actual data and transaction volume of a config server is quite small, so that this seems a bit too much.

Is there a way to (safely!) run these config servers with much less disk use for the journal? Do I need journalling at all on config servers? Can I set the journal size to be smaller?

I have a simple setup of 2 e-mail servers. My Exchange 2010 server, MS2010, is setup to forward all e-mails that it receives to the journaling mailbox. The journal mailbox is located on my Exchange 2007 server, MS2007. I have 2 messages in the last few days (since I've been watching) that simply fail to be received by the Journal mailbox on MS2007. Here is the receive connector log of the failed transmission -

2011-10-04T19:45:04.567Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B679,46,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20523,>,250 2.1.0 Sender OK,
2011-10-04T19:45:04.567Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B679,47,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20523,<,RCPT TO:<[email protected]> ORCPT=rfc822;[email protected],
2011-10-04T19:45:04.567Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B679,48,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20523,>,250 2.1.5 Recipient OK,
2011-10-04T19:45:04.567Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B679,49,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20523,<,BDAT 22080 LAST,
2011-10-04T19:45:04.676Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B679,50,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20523,>,550 5.7.1 Requested action not taken: message refused,
2011-10-04T19:45:04.676Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B679,51,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20523,-,,Local

For comparison, I clipped out the transmission conversation of a successful journal message delivery -

2011-10-04T19:45:51.707Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,53,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,>,250 2.1.0 Sender OK,
2011-10-04T19:45:51.707Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,54,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,<,RCPT TO:<[email protected]> ORCPT=rfc822;[email protected],
2011-10-04T19:45:51.707Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,55,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,>,250 2.1.5 Recipient OK,
2011-10-04T19:45:51.707Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,56,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,<,BDAT 60301 LAST,
2011-10-04T19:45:52.160Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,57,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,>,250 2.6.0 <[email protected]> Queued mail for delivery,
2011-10-04T19:45:52.176Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,58,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,<,QUIT,
2011-10-04T19:45:52.176Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,59,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,>,221 2.0.0 Service closing transmission channel,
2011-10-04T19:45:52.176Z,MS2007\From MS2010,08CE226DD039B67C,60,192.168.1.11:25,192.168.1.38:20532,-,,Local

What could be causing the 550 5.7.1 Requested action not taken: message refused, in this case? Where do I look?

We have Postini set up with their extended message discovery service. This requires having our exchange server set up to journal messages to their mail servers. Everything has been set up and working for months. Now, a couple of times an hour a message that we sent them is rejected as being spam. This is fine, since it usually is spam which has somehow got through the filter on it's way in, and we don't want spam in the archive anyway BUT Exchange keeps this message in queue and keeps trying to resend it:

After 24 hours, there are hundreds of messages in the queue, and Exchange is accessing the disk constantly. This is a double problem since our Exchange is in a VM, and it is causing performance issues for other VMs. If you manually clear down the queue it's fine again, until the queue refills.

How can I get Exchange to bin the messages it cannot send to Postini?