I have corrected an issue with telnet connections to shellx.eskimo.com from machines with firewalls blocking port 113 (auth).

If you were getting immediately disconnected, this was because shellx was attempting to use auth protocol to identify the originator and your firewall was blocking it.  I’ve removed this requirement so it will allow you to connect.

Ssh is still the preferred method because telnet does not encrypt traffic and your login and password are passed over the internet plain text.

If you are originating from a Windows machine, Putty will provide ssh capability and is free.

All servers are restored to service.  Maintenance activity that required servers being out of service has been completed.  There is still some activity that will result in a higher than normal load as backups are compressed but everything should be operational now.

We’ve got a 2-for-1 sale, bring a friend to Eskimo North when you renew your shell or web hosting account and give them an account for the same period free.

If you renew for a year, they can enjoy a year free.  This gives them the freedom to change their carrier without having to worry about changing their e-mail or web address as well.

It also gives them e-mail that isn’t mined to direct advertisements at you.  E-mail that is protected with encryption.  E-mail that can be accessed via web mail, imap or pop, and shell mailers like pine, elm, mutt, and many other popular mailers.

Our site is optimized to serve PHP and other dynamic content fast and securely so that applications like WordPress, Gallery, myBB, and Joomla will feel just like static content.

We also offer a free two-week trial so if you’d like to find out just how fast your application runs here, you can, at no risk or expense to you.

Sign up for a free trial at http://www.eskimo.com/shell/new.html.

If you have any questions about this offer or our service in general, please don’t hesitate to call us at 1-800-246-6874 or 1-206-812-0051.  You can also e-mail support@eskimo.com.

I would like to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

I am thankful for all of you who stuck with Eskimo through my 2-1/2 year imprisonment.  I am thankful for my wife and sons that have helped me through that period.

I am thankful for an excellent caring therapist I had in prison, the education I received while there, and the volunteers that came in and worked with us and helped me improve my life.

I am thankful for the people I’ve had help me make a better life for myself now.  I am thankful I had a home, at least part of a family, and all of you to return to.

I am thankful to the folks from Shoreline Covenant Church who have helped me adjust and recover.

I am thankful for my sister and how she took care of things after my mothers death and was kind to me.

I am thankful that my father is still with us.

I am thankful for God making his presence known while I was in solitary in a way that I absolutely couldn’t ignore or explain away.  I am thankful for him giving me life, love, and hope.

I am trying to live a life directed by love but I have to admit, sometimes I still let fear get the best of me, but nothing like before, and I am thankful for that.

I miss my mother but I am glad she is with God and no longer suffering and am thankful for that.

The maintenance scheduled for Saturday morning will be shorter than originally planned and will probably be completed by 1:30AM Pacific time.  This is because much of the work that was going to be done then was done today in an attempt to recover from the update induced problems.

Everyone’s INBOX should be restored.  There were two customers whose INBOX was not just moved to a BOGUS file and I had to restore your e-mail from backups made on the 23rd.  I will e-mail you individually.

For those who are interested in what technically went wrong, NFS version 4 uses a program called idmapd to map username to UID across an NFS connection so that files owned by a user on a server are owned by the same user on a client machine.

Until recently this daemon was able to determine the correct domain on it’s own, however, with a recent update, unless it was configured in /etc/idmapd.conf, it didn’t know what domain it belonged to and id mapping broke down.

The mail software, if it doesn’t know who a file belongs to, won’t append or otherwise modify it, instead it moves it to BOGUS.filename.xxxx where xxxx are four characters.  When id mapping went away, as either mail came in or people accessed mail with pop-3 or imapd, or from the shell server, or webmail, when that program attempted to modify your INBOX and couldn’t determine who owned it, it moved it to BOGUS.filename.xxxx and started a new box.

About 160 accounts got affected this way.  To correct this I had to take all the BOGUS files, put them back together into one spool file in the correct order and owing to the random characters, I couldn’t easily script it and had to do by hand which is why it took so long.

I apologize for this interruption.  I’m sure there was probably a note associated with one of these updates, the problem is there were between 300-900 updates to apply per server so no way I could read all that.

Updates to CentOS today and last night caused major problems.

There is a change in id mapping that is causing problem with mail, an update also overwrote my 2.4.6 Apache installation with an ancient version, and it caused some other issues.

The web server has been restored, I need to do an emergency reboot to get the
id mapping issues back in sync, and then will have to move mailboxes back in place by hand.  Please be patient, I am working on correcting this as fast as possible.

There will be maintenance activity between midnight and 4AM this coming Saturday to install a great number of updates to various servers and to image them after successfully updating.

Hopefully this will fix some things, in some cases it’s broken some things, dates, a calendar manager is no longer present.  Orang is still available.  I like dates better and I’ll see if I can chase down a working copy from a third party source.

I recently sent out a note to people still using the old ‘eskimo.com’ server to ask what they were using there that was not available or did not work properly on shellx.eskimo.com.

One thing was some of the BSD games like boggle.

The full suite of BSD games has been installed on shellx.  Most are under /usr/bin but fish, which for some reason was not included in the Fedora RPM, is in /usr/games.

I’ve added the necessary permissions for everyone who has a mysql database here so that Joomla should work without any modification to your permissions if you already have a database.

Anyone who would like to use Joomla or needs a mysql database for other reasons, please e-mail support and one will be created for you.  Please include your login and a desired password in your e-mail.

If you setup Joomla, one thing to be aware of, after you complete the install and remove the installation directory, your browser will still try to run install when you try to go to your Joomla home page.  The fix for this is to clear your browser cache.