Maintenance has been completed on MxLinux, and I apologized but I accidentally powered Zorin down in the process, hit a wrong button.

     The power supply on the host that failed has been replaced.  The old power supply really wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t large enough and when the machine got busy enough it exceeded the capabilities of the supply and it shut down.  It has been replaced with a larger supply with sufficient capability.

     Zorin, Vps1, Vps2, and Vps4 are moved back to their normal host.

     I am taking MxLInux down for about 1-1/2 hour to move it back to it’s normal hardware.

     I have replaced the power supply on the machine these are normally on and will be taking each down for a time in order to move them back to their normal host.

      I have gotten all the X2go supported WIndows Managers working on Ubuntu and MxLinux, therefore I am convinced I should also be able to do so on Zorin.

     In pursuit of that goal I am presently deleting most graphical applications, particularly those gnome related, which will also affect Mate, so I can start with a clean slate as it were, a step that was necessary to get everything working on Ubuntu.

     As a consequence, for the next day or two most windowing environments and applications will be missing from Zorin until I complete this work.  Systems most like Zorin to use in the meantime or MxLinux and Ubuntu, both of which have all the currently supported X2Go Desktops working.

     The above machines have all been relocated to different hardware pending power supply replacement on the failed machine.

     I’ve now got KDE, Gnome, MATE, LXDE, XFCE. IceWM, and OpenBox working on Ubuntu under X2Go.

     There are some caveats you should be aware of, not show stoppers, mere minor annoyances.  First the logout on KDE and LXDE are both painfully slow and on KDE it will start and stop the desktop about three times before finally logging out.

     With Gnome, there is no default logout applet.  In order to logout you first need to add the logout applet to your top panel.  To do this, hover your mouse cursor over the top panel, then simultaneously hold down the Windows button+ALT and right click over the panel.  You will get a short drop down menu, select Add to Panel at top.

     Then scroll down to find the logout applet, it will be a little green guy walking in a box. Select that and hit the “Add” button.  The applet will now appear on your panel.  You only need to do this on your first session, it will remain there after.  When you want to logout, click on this guy.  As with KDE and LXDE it’s a bit slow so be patient.

     Openbox will show as just a black screen.  Right click on your mouse and you will get a drop down menu to add things.

     The following machines are affected by a power supply failure on the physical host which hosts them, zorin, mxlinux, vps1, vps2, and vps4.

      I am in the process of moving these machines to a different host.  This will saturate the network during the copy and cause sluggish performance from some of the other shell servers and web server.

     Presently vps1 and vps4 are completed, the  others are in progress.

     Things didn’t go especially smooth but I now have all the NFS and virtual host servers upgraded.  I’ve been testing on one machine prior to upgrading the rest and this appears to fix the NFS synchronization bugs that have plagued us since 16.04 LTS (the last two years).

     One machine, the upgrade process removed a bunch of necessary packages like the RAID software and the EFI firmware for virtual hosts.  I’m still testing everything but as far as I know it’s all back together now.

     This is an update to an earlier message.  This evening around 8pm I will need to reboot all of the physical hosts.  This is more extensive than my earlier message but only reboots will be done at this time and updates to 18.04 LTS will be done on a later date.

     I discovered that Ubuntu will no allow us to upgrade the release until all existing updates are in place and this includes recent kernel updates.

     I apologize that this is being done outside of our normal early morning maintenance window, unfortunately scheduling conflicts make this necessary.  I will endeavor to make the downtime as brief as possible.

     I am anxious to get these in place because 18.04 LTS provides both improved stability and reboot reliability and ultimately once we get all the necessary tools in place, live kernel patching so that we no longer will need to reboot for kernel upgrades eliminating most future reboots.  In addition, I have not yet had a machine that I’ve already upgraded experience NFS issues which have plagued Ubuntu since 16.04 LTS.

     SquirrelMail has been puking out errors when mail with MIME attachments is read since we updated our web server to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and PHP 7.2.

     The update to PHP7.2 required an upgrade of squirrelmail, the upgrade of squirrelmail brought those messages.  I was able to chase this down to a DEBUG flag the developers left enabled and turn it off.

     If you are being overwhelmed with spam there are some things you can do to adjust spam filter sensitivities or whitelist or blacklist particular addresses:

https://www.eskimo.com/support/mail/spam-control-facilities/