I have taken social.eskimo.com down as I am trying to make the video upload function work properly as well as fix some user interface issues.  As this involves some major code modifications, it is off-line temporarily.

     phpBB3 has improved considerably with time and there are many extensions available and I have installed many of these.  With the Google Captcha we finally have spam under control.  We now have the ability of adding images, video, and sound to posts.  Please sign up and participate: https://www.eskimo.com/forums

     In the past I recommended Coppermine but Coppermine broke with 7.2.  It really died do to lack of interest and maintenance.  The authors did not keep it up to date with modern PHP standards.

     I recently replaced my Coppermine Gallery with Piwigo.  Piwigo is MUCH more capable, it has a plugin extension method and there are around 300 plugins currently available.  It works fast and proper with our hosting facilities.

     You can get it here: https://piwigo.org/get-piwigo

     If you do not have a database setup yet, you will need one so in that case e-mail support@eskimo.com and request a database.  There is no charge for this.

     If you’d like to see how this looks, you can visit my gallery at: https://www.eskimo.com/~nanook

     If you need any help e-mail nanook@yellow-snow.net or support@eskimo.com

This is the Pizza place we used to meet at after some asshole torched it.

     I’ve replaced the Intel NIC’s with TP-Link NIC’s.  The first machine took close to two hours because at first I was not able to get it to work.  I finally chased it down to lack of patience on my part, these cards take approximately 1 minute to initialize.

     I was not able to use the old cards in a private network as I had planned because as soon as I configured one, localhost became bound to it and broke the other connection.  I’m sure this is operator malfunction but I will need to do further research.

     I will be taking various machines down tonight for about fifteen minutes each to install new NIC cards with non-Intel chipsets.  From 4.15.0 forward, the Linux kernel has had a bug in the Intel E-1000 drivers that cause the cards to lock-up when hardware offloading is used.  Usually these lock-ups are transient resulting in 2-3 second delays in data but occasionally the cards will lock hard and require a drive to the co-lo facility to physically reset the machine.

     Because the servers most affected are those carrying heavy traffic, the NFS server providing the home directories in particular, I will be replacing the NIC cards on all the NFS servers.  This will affect virtually all of our services but will prevent long down times like we suffered Sunday morning from recurring.

     I filed a bug report April of this year on this problem.  Canonical has offered me various kernels to try, many of them either did not boot at all or were extremely unstable.  At this point I feel it’s more cost effective and less service affecting just to replace the hardware.

     The ethernet controller on the server that provides /home pages wedged today.  Most services depend upon being able to access /home and were unavailable as a result.

     As near as I can tell looking at the logs, the ethernet wedged shortly after 5AM but I did not receive any telephone calls until around 11AM.  I was unable to fix it from here so I had to drive to the co-location facility.

     Everything was back in service at 12:46 (afternoon).

     Completed imaging julinux.yellow-snow.net.  Give this machine a try, it’s a very nice Ubuntu derived server.  It has the stability and software base of Ubuntu but with nicer artwork.

     I am taking julinux down for a few minutes to make an image to capture all the recently installed software in the image.

     I am investigating a new location for our user meetings.  This would be Amante Pizza on 123rd and Roosevelt Northeast in Seattle.

     The Pizza is excellent, they have spirits for those who care to imbibe, and they have a big screen TV that in theory can be connected to a computer and we can use for presentations.  Many people seem to want a more structured meeting but trying to do presentations on paper doesn’t work so well.  Being able to fire up a computer with a big screen live would be a huge plus.

     They do not know what inputs it has so I have to stop by and determine how to connect.

     I had been to Amante before when they were on 196th and just off of 44th in Lynnwood.  That restaurant had good food, great decor, but piss poor service.  This restaurant has excellent food, excellent service, but marginal decor.  However I think the room there is much more suited to our needs, it is completely walled off with glass walls from the rest of the restaurant so our noise won’t interfere with other diners and vice versa.