I will need to take servers down for imaging and to reboot to load a new kernel to address some potential security and stability issues on all of the servers except ‘eskimo.com’, and it will be affected during the time the file server is down.  The down time for any given machine is not expected to exceed about 25 minutes but given that every server is affected, the duration of this maintenance activity is expected to last about two hours.

I’ve recently replaced the Google search box with a DuckDuckGo Search Box.

There are two reasons for this change, the first is Google’s total lack of respect for individual privacy.  They first had the gall to drive around neighborhoods and take pictures of peoples houses and yards and put them all online.  Now for Google Glass there exists a face recognition application that will allow a total stranger to look at you and instantly get background information.  This is technology totally out of control.

The second is Google’s recent move not to just index the Internet but to attempt to control it’s content.  We’ve had our Google Page Rank manually reduced because Google feels that some of our links are artificial.  I haven’t paid anyone to link to me and I don’t feel it should be Google’s prerogative to dictate whom I link to.  Call me unreasonable, call me what you will, but that’s how I see it.

Scientific has been reloaded and is again available for use.  If you were using OpenNX, NX Player or NX Client to connect, you will need to re-download the key from our website and then re-load it into the NX player or client.  The key changed because the software was reloaded.

I am still loading a lot of the applications that were there previously and some that weren’t and wouldn’t work but now do.

The upgrade from Scientific Linux 6.4 to 6.5 did not go well on scientific.eskimo.com in part because of compatibility issues with various third party packages I had installed.

Since only four people have used it to date; I decided that the best thing would be to re-install fresh from 6.5 media, then re-install third party packages, those that aren’t compatible will refuse to install.  That way the base installation will be clean.

Please use Shellx while Scientific is being re-loaded.

We are open on Saturdays and Sundays.

I just realized our .signature on support mail said, “Temporary Closed on Saturdays and Sundays”, this was a left over from between September 2009 and April of 2012 when I was gone.

I’ve fixed the signature, sorry it took me nearly two years to notice it.

I posted a message earlier asking for help with a perl script that was used for Rand-o-Dex (displays a random customers page).

Well, I chased the problem down to a missing script that the perl script called, and that script has been gone so long there was no hope of retrieving from backups.  So I wrote a script from scratch just using shell and got things working again.  So now, the user directory and Rand-o-Dex work once more.

However, there is a problem relating to caching in the browser.  Even if I add a Pragma NoCache meta tag and an expire meta tag, and tell Apache to expire in one second, Firefox and Aurora cache it anyway, so to get a different users page it is necessary to hold shift down while you do a reload.

If anyone knows of any fool-proof way to make Firefox NOT cache the page, please let me know.