The client pop3 and imap4 mail server mail.eskimo.com is now restored from backups, the updates successfully re-applied, and now this machine is no longer vulnerable to either spectre or meltdown exploits.

     Our client mail and smtp server is presently down owing to a failed kernel upgrade that mangled the boot block.  I am restoring the server from a backup.  It should be operational again in about ten minutes.

     Incoming mail will still arrive as incoming mail is processed by different servers and you can access it via any shell mail such as pine, mailx, etc but you will not be able to send until this is restored.

     Rebooting of all servers completed.

     NextCloud update completed.  As far as I know everything is operational again.

     Forums started working all by itself so may have been some garbage in cache.  Nextcloud is in the process of updating.

     I was cleaning up some files from a failed Diaspora install and did an rm -rf only to realize I was not where I thought I was (AARRRGGGHHH!) and was deleting our website.  By the time I realized this it was half gone.  I’ve restored it from backup but some things are not working, forums for example, so I am still trouble shooting that.  If you notice anything broken on the website besides forums and nextcloud, please e-mail nanook@eskimo.com (that be me).  Thank you!

     I’ve installed Mixxx on all the Debian based machines, debian, mint, mxlinux, ubuntu, and zorin.

     Mixxx is a software broadcast console with effects.  It could be useful for production work as well and work under x2go.

     The mail server maintenance took longer than expected owing to an error on my part.  It is completed and now has much more space available so that we should not run out of space again in the near future.

     I will be taking the client mail server down for approximately 1/2 hour in order to image the virtual machine and then to expand the image to accommodate a larger root partition.  The machine ran out of space about 3:30AM last night owing to logs growing too large.  This is to provide additional capacity for logs and temp files.

     Our server that houses home directories crashed today hard at 17:30 Pacific Time (5:30PM).  It was running an experimental 4.14.0 kernel in order to try to determine at what point a bug that causes the E1000 Ethernet controller chip to hang.

     It locked up so tight not even magic sys-req key worked.  That was the mainline 4.14.0 final release.  I had to power cycle the machine to get it to respond again.

     After it did I booted 4.14.0-rc0, the first release candidate of 4.14, it immediately crashed and burned.

     I told Canonical that I can not continue testing on production machines.  I put 4.15.0-21 back in place and disabled hardware offloading on that interface.  I’ve got a broken machine that I will try to repair and use it for testing.