My facsimile machine ran out of paper today and the spare paper I had all got wet from the tree limb through my roof, so it will be nonoperational until I can get more paper.  Please e-mail or call instead.

     We are going to attempt to change the default version of PHP to PHP 8.0.26 tonight.  The last time I attempted this there were too many applications that did not work but since that time several new releases have come out so we are going to try again.

     Just a reminder, if your own apps do not work well with PHP 8.0 you can override the PHP version: https://www.eskimo.com/support/override-php-version/

     Within half an hour of booting 6.0.15, the server which holds home directories and much shared disk space spontaneously booted.  While still not good, this is better than the behavior of 6.0.12 which locked up and did not reboot.

    Two customers reported mail failing to gmail, with the bounces indicating improper SPF records, however, I changed the SPF record along with the IP of the mail server at the same time AND pushed out the changes manually to all of our name servers.  Gmail was caching old data.  I have since tested and Google is again accepting our mail.

     I will be doing kernel upgrades tonight that were originally scheduled for last night.  I was able to recover my vehicle that my wife abandoned on the way home from work the night before last and most of the ice and snow has melted off the roads now.  I prefer doing them on Friday nights and especially don’t really want to be doing them Christmas evening but the existing kernel has a flaw that has so far resulted in the lock-up of four machines so really needs to be replaced as soon as possible.

     The photo gallery function of Friendica has been fixed.

     Talking to the provider of the infrastructure we use for dial-up, it is not yet set in stone, but we may be able to continue to offer this service into 2024, one of their larger customers is considering renewing their contract and if this happens they will continue into 2024, I will let you know as soon as I know.

     I still can’t get to my car and by the looks of our street it won’t happen tonight so the kernel upgrade is going to be put-off until at least Saturday night.  Hopefully the machines will make it another day without seizing because if they do I can’t get to the co-lo to fix at the moment.

     Kernel upgrades may or may not happen tonight.  I let my wife take my car to work last night because it is better in snow and ice than hers.  Coming home, she slipped a tiny bit, panic’d, parked it and walked the rest of the way.  Now, the road in front of my house is so icy I can not walk up it to get my car and so unless it melts enough that I can do that before 11pm, it will not happen tonight.

     The outage of virtual private servers was caused by a bug in the 6.0.12 kernel (the stability issues I mentioned earlier).  It has been responsible for locking up four different machines in the last two weeks and was scheduled to be upgrade this Friday, however, since I had already put the new kernel on the machine but not booted into it, the virtual private servers are now all upgraded.  Hopefully 6.0.15 will have resolved the issue but we will not know until some time passes.

      I had gotten confused about the day Christmas was on and had incorrectly announced kernel updates on Christmas Eve.  Actually they will be done on Friday evening the 23rd between 11pm-11:30pm providing the roads are still semi-passable.

     I will be upgrading to 6.0.15 from 6.0.12.

     Barring large amounts of snow on the roads, I will be doing a kernel upgrade this Christmas Eve starting at 11pm.  Not really the thing I want to be doing on Christmas Eve but the present kernel has shown some instability that lead to one machine locking up.

     This will impact all of Eskimo North’s paid and free services, including virtual private servers, shell servers, web hosting, e-mail, and our fediverse instances, https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://yacy.eskimo.com/.

     With the exception of Yacy which always takes longer because it rebuilds the index at start-up, the rest of the services should be not down for more than about ten minutes unless a server fails to shut down properly.