The attacks from Microsofts servers have not have not completely stopped but they’ve slowed considerably.
Looking specifically at what is in the logs tripping fail2ban, I find that they are trying to send mail from non-existent domains. This is something our servers will not accept anyway, so for now I’ve whitelisted the IP space involved which should let legitimate mail through.
E-mail from outlook.com is having issues right now because at least 750 of their servers are infected with or affected by some kind of botnet malware.
Our servers are equipped with fail2ban which watches logs for abusive behavior and locks those IP addresses out for a period of time. The attacks are still ongoing so releasing these blocks do no good and potentially harmful if malware were to spread to our servers or our customers machines.
I have notified Microsoft of this via their tech and abuse e-mail contacts and I have forwarded a list of the 750 servers thus far affected. This can affect other domains as they contract with Microsoft for mail delivery.
Reboots are completed, everything at eskimo.com back operational.
I plan on rebooting all servers around 11PM tonight. This is necessary to make various updates, some of which are security related, operational.
Downtime for any one machine should not exceed 10 minutes. I expect it to go smooth as other than routine updates supplied by OS vendors, I haven’t made any significant changes.
Apparently someone is calling my customers with scam calls representing us. I’m not calling people at random. If you happen to get one of these calls, please check your caller ID and collect the number and any other identifying information you can get.
Thank you.
Graphical Desktop sessions are now working on Centos-Stream.Eskimo.Com via X2go, RDP, VNC, and via the web (host or terminal) Guacamole services.
Redhat has decided to retire Centos8 early. Most of what was on Centos8 has been ported to Centos-Stream which is also available here. So if you were using the hostname Centos8.eskimo.com please change to Centos-Stream.eskimo.com.
If there is anything that you need that was on Centos8 but it is not on Centos-Stream, please create a ticket at https://www.eskimo.com/support/osTicket/ and I will install it for you.
The upgrade of Mint completed uneventfully. You’ll probably not notice much difference, it only affected 160 packages. This is the smallest distribution upgrade I’ve ever seen for ANY operating system and makes me wonder if Mint is dead.
I am going to take Mint down for about 30-45 minutes to make a backup prior to upgrading from Mint 20.2 Uma to Mint 20.3 Una. Mint upgrades have been fraught with problems in the past so want to make a backup first just in case it ends up in an unrecoverable situation. Once backup is completed it will be available though there may be some restarts needed during the backup.
It became clear from all the feedback I got that a notice I sent out was very misinterpreted. Eskimo North is NOT shutting down nor is our shell service, e-mail, web hosting, friendica, hubzilla, or nextcloud node.
The ONLY thing shutting down are two of the shell servers, one because it’s absolutely antique and incompatible with all the newer servers, and another because it is not getting any use.
Eskimo North, the service WILL REMAIN in operation, and the following URL is a list of servers that will remain available.
Here is a list of available shell servers that will remain available. The eskimo.com domain will ALSO remain available for all functions, e-mail, web hosting, etc. It is ONLY one very unused machine and one very antique machine that are being retired.
List of shell servers: https://www.eskimo.com/services/shells/servers/