ugh. am so frazzled with everything at work i can barely remember what day of the week it is. much less the date; i have to look over to my calendar, then think about what day it is (usually in terms of “well, X was due today, so it must be Tuesday/Wednesday/whatever”).

today was the day whereupon we turned harper into a mailserver. that was fun. except for the part where apparently you can’t override the values that sendmail automatically populates $w with. you can add values, but i’m damned if i can figure out how to eliminate entries that it has acquired via gethostbyname(3) or other mystical means. this seems to be just plain stupid, to me, and so i figure that i must be wrong. i mean, i must be, because surely no one would be so stupid. right? in twenty years of development no one else thought of a case where one might want to wipe out $w and start over? i must be wrong. this is what i keep telling myself. and yet, and yet… if you can do it, they did a bloody brilliant job of hiding the documentation as it’s apparently not on sendmail.org, in the bat book, or anywhere google indexes.

(situation: this machine “harper” needs to deliver mail for a hostname, “cshell.uchicago.edu.” however, it absolutely needs to *not* deliver as local mail addressed to “harper.uchicago.edu.” this is primarily because for the past five thousand years or whatever, harper has been quasi-interchangeable with @uchicago.edu (don’t ask) for the purposes of addressing mail. but now harper’s a mail server for only a very few people who don’t want to leave unix mail. so all the majority of people who have been using an address @harper for all these many years are not actually “harper mail” users, so harper must not deliver mail as though they are. however, sendmail stuffs “harper” into $w and i can’t seem to find a way to force it back out. i can’t use virtusertable because that takes effect only after local deliveries; i can’t use mailertable because that only affects hosts not in $w. i can’t manually set w with a C line because that only adds values. ARRRGH! i ended up having two completely separate sendmail configurations; one in the default sendmail.cf which is a nullclient and blindly forwards everything back up to the mail exchangers, and the other is the config for the listener. so the listener believes it’s harper, but it shouldn’t actually ever *get* any mail for a harper user; meanwhile, locally-created messages get the “duh, i dunno” response and harper just passes it up to uchicago.edu. OH BOY DID I HAVE FUN WITH ALL THAT THIS MORNING.)

finally i get harper up and done (or so i think…) and we discover, via this really catty email from a user (because that’s how you get a response out of those slovenly, slacker computer people, you know; they’re like oxen, you have to hit them for their own good), that a software update i applied to puremessage last night blew away some of our customizations to the end-user interface; notably, bits of the authentication subsystem. that’s okay. people didn’t really need to log in or anything.

get that fixed, and then harper’s nfs decided to flake out, which of course brings incoming mail to a grinding halt because without home directories we can’t read .forwards, etc., so i have to drop fucking everything to reboot the machine in the middle of the damn day.

blah de fucking blah. did i mention i got to work at 2 this morning?

today sucks. i want to go home.