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.

     Some time ago I started a new build for a new server based upon the i9-9900k.  I purchased the motherboard, but subsequent upgrades to Linux improved performance to where it was not necessary.  I was going to go with the i9-9900k because it was economically doable while the next generation really wasn’t.  I do not want to go to even newer generations because the e-core/p-core system of newer Intel processors has proven not entirely stable under Linux yet.

     Well, in the meantime, web traffic has doubled and the number of virtual private servers has grown to the point where if one machine failed, the remaining would not be able to run all the existing services with good performance so time to continue the build.

     I managed to score an i9-10900x CPU off of Amazon, new, for under $400 which is about half of what I had expected to pay for the i9-9900k.  This CPU is better in two ways, it has 48 PCI lanes so nvme SSDs can talk faster, and people have been able to get it to clock at 5Ghz without an issue.  This is a 10 core, 20 thread CPU, but the most useful thing about it for us is that it can support 256GB of RAM and it has four memory channels rather than two providing a whopping 90gb/s of memory bandwidth.  And best of all this CPU will work in the motherboard I had purchased for the i9-9900k.  And the ‘x’ part denotes that it is binned by Intel.  Basically, when CPUs are made, those nearest the center of the die provide the highest clock rates at the lowest voltage and heat dissipation.  Intel tests the chips and those with the highest performance get an ‘x’ part number instead of a ‘k’, otherwise the chips are identical.  This is significant in this application as cooling will be the main challenge.  For that I ordered a Noctua D15 cooler.  I am going to start with it’s 82CFM fans, and if those prove insufficient I can order some 300CFM fans that fit in the same form factor but are noisy but since this is going into a data center that already sounds like you’re standing behind a 747 at takeoff, that doesn’t really matter.

     The old Iglulik machine will then serve primarily as an additional machine for VPS’s with the new machine becoming the main web server and probably also will host ubuntu.

     If anyone knows any good relevant inuit / eskimo words, I am open to suggestions for new server name.  Shorter words are better.  Thanks.

     Planning on upgrading all the systems to Linux 6.1.14 Friday 3/3/2023 starting at 11PM.  If all goes well, should be completed by 11:30PM, if not it maybe another 1-1/2 hours (if a physical host does not reboot properly).

     This will effect all services including shell accounts, web hosting packages, e-mail, etc.  It also will affect our free fediverse services, https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://yacy.eskimo.com/.

     All services are not expected to be down more than about ten minutes individually except yacy which takes about 30-40 minutes to rebuild it’s database after a reboot.

     Some of our customers have had e-mail to sites hosted by Outlook fail and get bounced with something on the order of cannot lookup sender address or some such.

     Microsoft claims troubles leaving there fine, i.e., they have no issue but Down Detector says otherwise and I’ve had reports from other sites experiencing the same, so just a heads up, this issue is affecting multiple sites to Outlook addresses or addresses hosted by outlook and the issue is not on our end.