Kernel upgrades are completed.  Ran into a few minor software issues on some machines but all are resolved now.

     We will be upgrading our server kernels on Saturday the 18th starting at 11pm Pacific Daylight Time.  Expected downtime is about ten minutes per service with the exception of Yacy which can take half an hour or longer to rebuild database after a reboot.

     This will affect all of our services, free and non-free, virtual private servers, shell services, e-mail, and web hosting.  The free services are the fediverse services, https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://yacy.eskimo.com/.

     I had announced previously plans to retire manjaro as it was not getting any use, but in the last three months three people have started using it, therefore I do not intend to retire it at this point.

     On another note, the 6.1 kernel has been declared to be a “long-term” kernel, which means it will be supported for a long time for things like bug fixes and security fixes.  I am very happy about this as it is hands down the best performing kernel we have ever run.  6,2 so far does not perform well enough to use in service.  But we will not be forced out of 6.1 any time soon for security reasons, so this is good news.

     A customer had an issue with a CGI that was part of his website not being found.

     I found a configuration error in our website where the CGI directory was defined globally rather than just for our website causing the server to look in the wrong place for CGI scripts.  This is now fixed.

     Hopefully without any unintended side effects.

     If you are experiencing any CGI issues, please contact support@eskimo.com and let us know.

    Machine is repaired and back in place, everything should be functioning at full speed again.

     Got the machine repaired, taking it back to the co-lo, should be there in about 40 minutes.  The old fan was doing about 3RPM, new fan worked fine so not a controller issue.

     Ice, the physical host with a number of virtual private servers is refusing to boot.  This is usually a Poettering thing where systemd either gets stuck shutting something down or starting something up but requires physical intervention so I will need to drive down to the co-lo facility which takes approximately 1/2 hour to boot in person.

     Upgrading Eskimo North server kernels to 6.1.16 this evening starting at 11PM.  Should be finished by 11:30PM providing no physical server hangs.

     This involves all of the servers so shell servers, mail servers, web server, virtual private servers, will all each be down about 3-10 minutes depending upon the machine complexity.

     The free fediverse services, https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://yacy.eskio.com/ will also be down during this maintenance.  Most will return in 3-10 minutes, the exception being yacy which rebuilds it’s database after reboot, a process that can take as much as 40 minutes.

     A relatively small portion of the domains hosted here has https and http2 enabled by an encryption certificate.

     The primary advantage of https is so all of the data flowing between the web server and the web client is encrypted so can’t easily be monitored by a third party.  A secondary advantage is that Google ranks https sites higher than http only if all other things are equal.

     An encryption certificate also enables http/2, a  modification of http protocol in which instead of opening a TCP connection to transfer each object, the web page, any images, separate CSS code, separate JavaScript code, etc. Because there is a three-way handshake for each item this increases latency loading web pages.  HTTP2 addresses this by opening just one connection and sending all items over that one connection.  This results in faster page loads and also higher google ranking.

     If you wish to have your domain https enabled, there is no additional fee for us, you just have to purchase a certificate from someone who sells SSL certificates.  This would be used for Apache which requires certificates to be in the PEM format, although I can convert from most modern formats using openssl.  An annual certificate for a single domain name + www.domain name is usually around $40/month.  Contact support@eskimo.com if you wish to pursue this.

     Just a reminder, we do NOT use password aging here so you will NEVER get an e-mail from us telling you that your password has expired.

     If you receive such a mail it is from a third party attempting to look like us in an attempt to get your authentication information from you.  DO NOT give your login credentials including password to anyone asking them by e-mail, even if they include a link to what looks like our site.

     Unfortunately phishing scams are really on the rise recently.  I don’t know why this is the case but it is.  So keep your credentials secured.