The Saga of my Mara Install ... a success story (or so I hope!)

[Greg Platt - Platt Consultants]

Hi again, Remco (and other mara users too). I appreciated your reply to my
Wednesday night inquiry. I was certainly feeling naked, alone and lonely out
here on the American Frontier with hostile Apaches around and no word from
folks back at the "Mara Fort" at all. Frankly knowing there was someone
there who at least cared was enough to give me the courage to tackle my
install problems on my own and fix almost all of them with lots of help from
my friends on the Debian Forums site (http://forums.debian.net)

On Thursday after receiving your note, I gave up on waiting for advice from
the mara list and instead decided to dive straight into the lions' den armed
with nothing but a wooden sword and a rubber machete. Fortunately, the lions
had no idea that I was incapable of injuring a fly and were so shocked to
see me jump straight into  their midst making so much noise, that they
basically turned and ran in all directions! :-)

I began by discarding my existing mara configuration and I rebuilt
everything from scratch beginning with the installation of the second IP
address on my dedicated server, continuing on to the registrar for my DNS
domain, then tackling a rebuild of mararc and moving on to setup the mara
zone files. I even adjusted the configuration of my Apache VirtualHosts to
correctly handle what mara provides. 

When I encountered a problem, I analyzed and did battle with it until I
managed to make it work the way I understood it should. In doing that, I
gradually isolated and eliminated the causes of all the problems I'd been
having with the old setup and was able to focus on each issue until I
conquered it. As a result, it appears I now have a stable mara install that
works right for all of my test domains and consistently delivers the visitor
to the right web site every time thus producing the results I was expecting
in the beginning.

Frankly, the errors I had made during my second attempt at DNS server
installation and setup were widespread and based on my misunderstandings.
They began with the definition of the DNS server at my domain registrar and
continued through the mararc and zone file setups. They also involved the
setup of virtual hosts in Apache as well. 

To be honest, the intricate and complex interplay between the Domain
Registrar and the Domain Name Server software and the Web Server hardware
and Apache server itself are complicated and confusing to sort out on your
first or second trip through the forest... especially when you have no guide
and no map to follow as you begin the journey. Although I'm generally pretty
good at figuring this stuff out, I had a tough time sorting it in my head
with no one around to talk to who understood the process and the issues
involved even as half well as I did.

But in the end, I did solve most of the problems and mara does seem to be
working now. The only thing I can't figure out is why I can't SEE maraDNS
running among the tasks on my server. I know it IS running, because I can
SEE the results, but when I try to SEE the task running using 

ps aux|grep mara

it doesn't show up in the list of active tasks on my Debian Etch 4.0r3
system. The troubling part of this is that sometimes mara starts as it's
expected to and at other times it either does NOT do so or it stalls at some
point after it started successfully. 

If you can shed any light on this issue, I would certainly appreciate your
advice on what to do about it. Other than that, everything does now seem to
be working as it should be.

In the immortal words of General Custer, "How much trouble can a few Indians
possibly cause?"

Thanks again for your help and feedback, Remco. You have NO idea how much
they helped!

Best Professional Regards,
WebSissy 



-----Original Message-----
From: Remco Rijnders [mailto:remco at webconquest.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 1:20 AM
To: gregplatt at ix.netcom.com
Subject: Re: Need some Mara insights please.

Hi Greg,

You do not need to worry. I don't think you've done anything wrong or said
anything that would rub people the wrong way. I'm sorry for not having
responded to your enquiry yet, but work has been busy and to be frank, I
simply didn't know the answer to your question or didn't have an idea on
what it could be.

In the past year or so, Sam wanted support mail not to be sent to the
list, but when he got a burn out recently, he decided that he did want all
support mail to go to the list. No payment or donation is necessary in
order to receive an answer from Sam, but he too is limited in the time he
has available. I think we still have to work a bit on making the list feel
more of a community than it currently is so others may feel more willing
to chip in their two cents worth. Other than me and Sam, I don't think too
many people are active with answering questions unless they happen to know
the answer from the top of their head.

Would it be ok if I get back to you over the weekend to see what we can
find out?

Please note that only one mail you sent to the list on monday made it
through; I don't think the second one did, but I'm not sure why; What I do
know though that it is nothing personal. Did you receive any sort of
bounce mail? Maybe you had an attachment that caused the mail to be
dropped, or perhaps you sent from a different address? I can have a look
at the mailserver logs to see what went wrong, but that too I won't get to
today.

Kind regards,

Remco