The shell server ubuntu.eskimo.com is back up on 14.04.  I am applying updates to bring it current before starting a release upgrade again.

      The upgrade of ubuntu.eskimo.com from 14.04 to 14.10 (an intermediate version before going to 15.04) failed.  Ubuntu is down while being restored from backup and then I will make another attempt.  If you need a Debian based shell server, please use debian.eskimo.com or mint.eskimo.com in the meantime.

      I am in the process of upgrading Ubuntu from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 15.04.  The upgrade program removed the postfix user and group which will break postfix until they are re-installed.  For this reason, please do not send e-mail from Ubuntu for now.  I will post here again when the upgrade is completed and postfix fixed.

     We had problems with numerous servers this morning that I tracked down to a problem with NIS, a network information system used to map user names to user IDs and vice versa as well as distribute password information, home directories, etc, across the servers.  This caused issues across the board with web servers, ftp, e-mail, login to any service.

     The immediate issue causing the outage has been resolved and I am going to make some changes to improve redundancy with this sub-system to prevent a future recurrence.

   There will be a brief reboot of the client mail server, mail.eskimo.com, in order to install a kernel with samba support that is required by OpenChange, an open source program which provides support for MS-Exchange protocol.

     The most recent X2Go client mostly works with MacOS.  There is a problem however, it only works if you use sh, ksh, bash, or some other Bourne shell derivative here.  If you use csh, tcsh, or other non Bourne shell derived shell it will fail to map the keyboard correctly.  This is because it uses bash (and apparently only the /bin/sh subset of commands) to execute xmodmap to do keyboard mapping.  It only does this on MacOS, and consequently this only is a problem if you are originating from a Mac OS/X based machine.

      I will need to reboot shellx to load a new kernel which has some capabilities that are required by some services on shellx.  I will be doing this later this evening (Saturday May 2nd).

     This is the current status of the ticket.  The outage was caused by a fiber cut that has been repaired. If you encounter any further problems please contact support@eskimo.com or call us at (206) 812-0051.  Thank you.

5/2/2015 11:10:00 AM – GenoZ

Hello,

Thank you.

    Some of our 56K California access numbers using the O1 network are presently out of service.  We have opened a trouble ticket and are awaiting resolution.

If you have a computer running Windows and haven’t run a virus scan recently, I highly recommend you do so.  I have a little XP Box that I use for nothing other than playing an online MMORPG or occasionally burning a DVD.  Most of the time it’s powered down and even it managed to pick up a virus despite the fact that I neither web browse or e-mail with it and I’ve got all unnecessary services turned off.

     I’ve also seen a huge up tick in the number of botnet brute force password guessing attempts, from on the order of around 300 a day to over 2000 in the last few days, a sure sign some new nasty Windows malware is circulating.

     In addition to whatever anti-virus you normally use, I highly recommend installing Malware Bytes and enabling root kit and full machine scans and doing a scan with it.  In my experience, it often finds things no other anti-viral software does.  For Anti-Virus software, I use AVG, Kaspersky is also good though heavier weight, it consumes a lot of CPU, and not good on a gaming machine.  I do not recommend Norton or McAfee as many of the support calls I get from customers not able to get or send e-mail often resolve by disabling one of these two.