The router I ordered from Amazon did not arrive yesterday.  When I checked shipping, it had not even shipped.

     I called Amazon and they said they were out of stock and it was back ordered, estimated to be here on June 6th.

     I asked to have my one day shipping fee refunded since they obviously did not ship in time for it to arrive the next day, the droid refused.

     I asked to talk to a supervisor and made the same request, the supervisor complied.

     I’ve placed another order with a provider in Oregon that does have one in stock and it should be here Saturday or Monday.  I did not cancel the Amazon order so I will have a spare.  Operating without a hardware firewall is undesirable so wish to resolve this as soon as possible.

     In the meantime, our website can be reached via https://www.eskimo.com/ but not without the ‘www’.

     Several recent changes I made to our web server, compiling and installing the most recent versions of openssl and gnupg, and installing new SSL certificates with a slightly different more unified naming convention, broke guacd, the daemon that interfaces to the server to provide mapping of vnc or ssh to a desktop or terminal.

     I have since recompiled guacd and fixed the configuration file to reflect the new naming convention for the certificates.  The change to certificate naming and location allows me to drop a new certificate into one place and have it be effective system wide.

     Our border router failed today, this is the router that connects the outside world to our servers,  This particular model used to be carried by Fry’s but as luck would have it, they were sold out.  There are no other dealers that I can find listed locally so I’ve ordered a replacement from Amazon.

     In the meantime, I’ve configured one of our servers to play router.  This may slow things down somewhat but should not be significant.

     Microsoft Visual Studio Code is available now in all the Debian derived servers, this would include debian, mint, julinux, mxlinux, ubuntu, and zorin.  Although it is ‘code’ from the command line, on most machines it will only start from the menu’s.

     It is under Applications -> Programming -> Visual Studio Code

     I apologize for the brief interruptions in mail and web services today.  It was necessary to install new SSL encryption certificates as the old were about to expire.  Comodo is now Sectigo and they only shipped me the domain cert and one of two intermediate certificates and no root certs so the bundle-ca file they provided didn’t work.  Had to get them to re-issue so it took two installs.  In the process I discovered a configuration issue with the incoming mail servers.  Encrypted mail would only work if the far end requested STARTTLS on port 25, port 587 and 465 were not operational.  Now it will accept encrypted e-mail on any of these ports either STARTTLS or TLS wrapper mode.

     I received a call today asking when the web server would be back up.  The operating system was responsive, Apache was running but some pages would come up and some would not.  I wasn’t able to determine the cause but rebooted the server and it hung during the reboot attempt.  I then hard forced a boot and after it came back up it seemed to operate normally.

     These two virtual machines are moved to their new hosts.

     I am taking julinux and scientific7 down for a couple of hours to move them to different physical hosts so that public name servers are distributed across different physical host machines so at least one will be up at any given time.

     Tonight I completed the task of configuring the new drives in and moving data to them.  This required a lengthy downtime of the virtual machines including web service on this particular host because data can’t be accessed while it is being moved from one RAID array to another.

     I still have to check all the machines to make sure all disk partitions are properly mounted and all machines properly NIS bound but otherwise everything should be good.

     New drives are successfully installed.  Haven’t got them configured into a RAID array yet but the machine sees them so the hardware is good.