I’m going to upgrade all of the system kernels to 5.17.3 on Friday April 15th between 11pm and midnight Pacific time.

     I would have stuck with the 5.16 kernel until hell froze over if Linus had chose to make it a long term supported kernel, but unfortunately he did not.  5.15 did not perform well and is the previous long term release.  As near as I can tell, a kernel has to have garbage performance in order to be considered for long term support.

     Anyway, I expect reboots to be done by 11:30 and then the next half an hour will be fixing any broken NFS/NIS mounts and given that they’ve done major work on NFS, probably will see some new unfamiliar NFS issues.  So if this update runs past midnight that is probably why.

     This will effect all Eskimo’s web services including our main website https://www.eskimo.com/, nextcloud https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, friendica at https://friendica.eskimo.com/, and hubzilla at https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/.

     Ubuntu crashed around 3PM today while I was applying updates.  I do not yet know what caused it.

     Debian is back up but the gcc is back to an older version so I’m going to attempt a compile 11.2 which I know is a good version as I use it for kernel compiles.

     Sorry, I broke Debian tonight.  I am going to load backups so I can recover /usr/local which I destroyed by installing a broken version of gcc that overwrote the working version.  Then I will reboot back into the current version and replace /usr/local with the backed up version.  Sorry this is kind of a screwball process owing to backing up the machine as a disk image.  It should be operational again by about 1AM.

     We now offer cockpit control panel for our virtual private servers if they are a debian derived system such as debian, ubuntu, mint, mxlinux, zorin, julinux, etc.

     I’ve been down on control panels in general for security reason but this one looks good as it does not require any special privileges and only gives the user access they would have logged into a shell in terms of permissions.  Permissions can be elevated in the same way they could from a shell, so if a user is in a group such as admin, they get the access that goes with it in cockpit.  The only issue is you are still using a web browser which may or may not be secure and your machine may or may not be sure but that issue exists with ssh access or x2go as well.

     If you would like this installed on your Virtual Private Server initiate a support ticket with your request.

     Eskimo North NextCloud located at https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/ has been upgraded to version 22.6 and additionally some new applications have been installed including a shared white board and chat, and quite a few others. 

     Some tables which previously were unindexed are now indexed which provides some performance improvements.