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.

     If you are having problems connecting to any services here, please let me know.  We are having some peering issues with Comcast causing some issued for Customers accessing us through Comcast.  It seems that peering is going through CenturyLink’s network.  I’ve generated tickets for this from each end, but the more information we can collect on how widespread this is the better.

     If you are having issues, if you can go to our website and under “Web Apps”, pulldown menu, click on Your IP Address and let me know the result.  This will help us isolate the failing network node involved.  Thank you.

     The kernel upgrade last Friday introduced bugs worse than it fixed resulting in some instability.  As a result, we’ll be doing another upgrade this Friday to fix the bugs the last bug fixes introduced.  Hopefully better results this time, only time will tell.

     Reboots are completed.  All machines up and verified proper NIS and NFS mounts and all subsystems started successfully.  Two machines are still on 5.16.14, those are the UUCP machine and manjaro, and this because I’m having difficulties getting 5.16.17 to build properly on those boxes.  I have a bug report opened on bugzilla regarding failed compilation on these machines.

     I am going to be rebooting all the machines to upgrade the kernels tonight starting at 11PM.  I expect all to be done by 11:30PM.  Interruption of individual services should be brief.

     Per a customers request, tmux is now installed on all shell servers.

     All disks are now good, no more errors, and loads on all machines now are satisfactory, switching to virtio drivers on all the virtual hosts made a HUGE difference.  Not hard to get results like below with STATIC HTML content, but find another site that loads PHP based WordPress site in this time frame!

     Doing some benchmarking on virtual machines, I discovered on fast drives that virtio drivers are about 10% faster than emulated SATA drives for the SAME hardware.

     I had erroneously assumed SATA would be faster because it supported hdparm read-ahead where virtio does not support this parameters, but it turns out that the Linux kernel has demand read-ahead that detects sequential reads and automatically reads ahead and prefills buffers when it detects this. That nullifies this advantage and thus the reduction in interrupts and system calls of virtio provides better performance.

     As a consequence, I am going to take the web, mail, and uucp servers down briefly around 11pm tonight to change it’s virtual disks from SATA to virtio.

     The brief interruption of web services at 5PM Pacific Time today March 20th was for the purpose of increasing the memory allocated to the web server from 64GB to 80GB to provide a bit more overhead for load spikes.