Our servers are in a facility with UPS and diesel backup so they are not directly affected by the storm.  But my home office has two ways of getting to the Internet, a T1 to the co-location facility and a Comcast Cable modem.

     The T1 is down hard, and the Comcast service has been down more than it’s been up. Our telephone service is also Comcast.  Consequently if you can’t get through please leave voice mail with your name, telephone number, login, and the nature of your issue.

     As an alternative, use the ticket system.  In either case, I will get to your issue as soon as I am able.  Our connectivity to my office today has been highly Intermittent, but the servers at the co-location facility have been solid.

     In addition to wired services being out, our T-mobile cellular service has also been mostly inoperative today.  So please be patient.

     Our web server stopped functioning around 12:20PM today (August 28th 2015).

     I was unable to login to the machine to assess what was happening.  Whatever it was saturated disk I/O and ftp which is on the same machine continued to function but ssh and vnc did not.

     The logs did not provide any useful details to isolate the cause.  I have not seen this behavior in this machine previously.

     There were a number of recent updates.  Also I added two more gigabytes of RAM for a total of ten instead of eight.

     The shell server mint.eskimo.com was recently reloaded with Mint-Mate 17.2 to bring it up to date.  I am still in the process of loading applications and this will take a while to complete.

     If there are specific applications you use, please e-mail support@eskimo.com and I will expedite the loading of those applications.

     As always, if there are any applications that you would find useful not present on our servers, please make a request to support@eskimo.com.

New Recently Installed Applications on Fedora.Eskimo.Com:

• Scilab – Scientific Software Package for Numerical Computations
• Enguage Digitizer – Convert an Image File Containing a Graph or Map into Numbers
• DB Browser for SQLite – A Light GUI Editor for SQLite Databases
• Database Browsers – View the Scheme and Data of Databases
• Sqliteman – Administer and Develope Sqlite3 Databases
• Fluid – Fast Light User Interface Designer, an interactive GUI designer for fltk.
• Padre – Perl Application Development and Refactoring Environment
• eric6 – Integrated Development Environment for Python (software center says not installed but was installed via dnf)

     The new router made it through the night which is more than the first one did.  I notice on this one when I make a configuration change and save, it is instant, where the previous one there would be a one-two second delay and occasional failures to save. I think the previous unit just had a bad drive.

     I could be curious to hear, especially from those who use the site interactively using either the X2Go interface or ssh, if it is subjectively any smoother for you.  My cable connection isn’t the best so it’s difficult to separate short cable lag which doesn’t last long enough to get a traceroute going.

     The new router is in place.  The interface is switched to full duplex.  Going to monitor at 100mb/s for a while before switching to 1gb to make sure it’s stable.

     I received the replacement router today.  I intend to install it this evening.  There will be a very brief interruption of perhaps up to a minute while I move the Ethernet cables over to the new router and it takes the router a few seconds to adjust the port parameters.

     The mysql database used for websites here got corrupted.  I had to stop it and do repairs on all tables to fix.  If you got a “Cannot connect to database.” message, this was the cause.  It is now fixed.

     The old SunOS based eskimo.com shell server is wedged.  It will be restored around 11AM.  In the meantime please use one of the Linux based shell servers.

     No major maintenance activity planned for this Friday evening August 21st.

     We are still waiting on the arrive of a replacement router to replace the unit that lasted only five hours after replacing our old router which is presently back in service.

     It has been in service for 20 years now but it does not support anything faster than 100-base-T half duplex and can’t even fully saturate that.