If you live in Washington State, you may want to know about this: 

     Mail is back up and is now on a stable but slower platform.  I will need to reload Linux on the other machine as it has somehow become badly corrupted.  Systemd is not acting properly on the larger machine and is starting servi ces, particularly systemd-networkd which needs NOT to be running as I use network-manager, even though they are masked that breaks the network.  It’s not impossible that it has become infected with some sort of malware, though the last time I had machines with a confirmed virus was three decades ago.  But then there are those among us who consider systemd to be malware…  I have looked and can’t find anything but it is possible to disguise things as system processes, etc.  Given though that this happened right after a drive went south, it is more likely just corruption of something somewhere, maybe multiple somethings but then again our web server was recently the target of a denial of service attack so who knows.  Cleaning it out and starting fresh is the safest bet.

Mail is going to be down for approximately 2 hours to move from the present host that has some software networking instability issues and needs a reload to a stable host. Because this involves copying 400GB of data across a 1Gb/s link, it will take approximately two hours, I expect it to be back up around 23:00 March 15th.

Inuvik, the server that runs all the social media and also runs manjaro and alma shell servers is still out of service.  I can’t get an Asus X299 board that doesn’t have dead memory channels, they are all just shit, and I got a Gigabyte board that did work but one of the SATA controllers went south so four ports don’t work and the remaining four take errors.  Also the video card slot is intermittent.  I suspect the bad SATA controller chip is putting noise on the bus screwing everything else up.  I’ve ordered another one of these boards, be another week or so for it to get here.  Not sure why the SATA port crapped out, that is just weird.

     The DCI-P3 standard is INADEQUATE.  To my eyes at least, 620nm light does NOT appear RED, it appears watermelon orangish, NOT a pleasing color to represent say a red rose.  I don’t understand why it is so difficult to make pixel filters, or quantum dots in the case of Qled technology that make 670nm light so the full spectrum can be more accurately represented? Well Ok, I do understand the issue of filters when white leds are used as a light source since most white leds use shitty phosphors with essentially no real red content, but Qled quantum dots should be able to produce ANY color desired.  I do realize the eyes are less sensitive thus requiring more power to produce a bright real red, but all for spending the power to get an accurate color display.

     The machine which provides the mail spool, ubuntu, and some other systems is having issues rebuilding a RAID array after a disk replacement marking the RAID dirty and preventing it’s re-assembly.

    The machine is back up and operational at the time of it’s posting but I do not know yet if it will be stable.

     As some of you may be aware, I’ve been building kernels for Eskimo’s servers and for my own workstation tickless for some time and making them available to the general public.  Until now I have not made realtime kernels available because building realtime used to conflict with virtual machines, virtual GPUs, and some other generally useful features.

     When the realtime kernel was first integrated into the mainline kernel, UHD630 Intel graphics did not work and since that is what I have on my workstation I did not pursue it.  However, it is now working as are virtual machines under a realtime kernel. I have not yet tested virtual gpu passthru so I do not know if it is working at present but it is such a rare use case I felt it worth while to make this available regardless.

     You can download these kernels from https://www.eskimo.com/kernel/, or by ftp at ftp://ftp.eskimo.com://pub/kernel/, chose the appropriate version (usually only the most current) and the flavor client, server, or realtime.  Then if you have a debian based system, download the *.deb files and install with dpkg -i *.deb, or if you have Redhat based system, download the *.rpm files and install with rpm -i *.rpm.  Note you may have to remove conflicting packages like the previous header package.  To do so without having to remove half your operating system, specify the –nodeps option to rpm -e, for example rpm -e package, you may have to do this also for previous develop packages.

     These kernels are provided without warrantee, however, I would like to hear of something does not work.  If you encounter problems, please e-mail support@eskimo.com.

     The server Inuvik that provides all of these services has been down for a while.  I apologize this but I spent some time in the hospital with a serious infection and another month on home IV and working on computers will tethered to an IV wasn’t very tenable.

      I had ordered a new CPU but that CPU turned out to be defective, would not even post, and then yet another Motherboard also died.  I received a new motherboard, but it has a dead memory channel so it’s going back.  I have yet another I am trying to install now.  Yet another new CPU should arrive between this Wednesday and next Monday so hopefully I can get this b east back online soon.

The grub subsystem on mail.eskimo.com has been repaired. For some reason the Ubuntu update system installed some packages needed for a signed kernel onto a system that is running an unsigned kernel AND installed some arm64 packages on an x86_64 system. I’ve deleted the inappropriate packages, installed the correct and necessary packages and test booted to make sure it comes up cleanly.

I have to take the mail subsystem down for perhaps 45 minutes or so in order to fix an issue with grub that was broken by a Ubuntu update that left it in a half-secure boot and half non-secure boot state.  This could, if not fixed, cause a failure to reboot at a more critical time.  It’s best that I address this now while usage is low.